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Semantic Web

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Definition

The central idea of the Semantic Web initiative is to enrich Web content by machine-processable semantics. The approach is based on the following ideas:

  1. 1.

    Use meta-data (data about data) as semantic annotations

  2. 2.

    Use ontologies to describe knowledge needed to understand collections of Web information. The semantic annotations are linked to such ontologies

  3. 3.

    Use logic-based techniques to process and query collections of meta-data and ontologies

In the current Semantic Web work, two main goals can be distinguished.

Interpretation 1: The Semantic Web as the Web of Data

In the first interpretation, the main aim of the Semantic Web is to enable the integration of structured and semi-structured data sources over the Web. The main recipe is to expose data-sets on the Web enriched with semantic annotations, to use ontologies to express the intended semantics of these data-sets, in order to enable the integration and unexpected re-use of these data.

A typical use case for this...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Antoniou G, van Harmelen F. A semantic Web primer. 2nd ed. Cambridge: MIT Press; 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Staab S, Studer R, editors. Handbook on ontologies. 2nd ed. New York: Springer; 2008.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Berners-Lee T, Hendler J, Lassila O. The semantic Web. Sci Am. 2001;284(5):34–43.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. REASE. Available at: ubp.l3s.uni-hannover.de/ubp.

  5. www.SemanticWeb.org.

  6. www.w3.org/2001/sw/.

  7. www.ontology.org.

  8. The International Semantic Web Conference (http://iswc.semanticweb.org/).

  9. Journal of Web Semantics (www.elsevier.com/locate/websem).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Greece

    Grigoris Antoniou & Dimitris Plexousakis

Authors
  1. Grigoris Antoniou
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  2. Dimitris Plexousakis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Grigoris Antoniou .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Fac. of IE & Mgmt., Technion--Israel Inst. of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Avigdor Gal

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Antoniou, G., Plexousakis, D. (2018). Semantic Web. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1320

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