Glossary: Semantic/Semantic Web [was: Re: Glossary: Web Content]

> more suggestions please..................Katie

Since every week or so I try to put a finger on "Semantic" and the
"Semantic Web", I may as well give it another try:-

[Semantic]
Use of adjective "semantic" is to pertain to the communication of
meaning, and of the significance and connotation of concepts.

[Semantic Web]
The Semantic Web is a conceptual information space in which the
resources identified by URIs can be processed by machines. It operates
on the principles of "partial understanding" and "inference" (being
able to infer new knowledge of terms from data that you already
understand), and hence evolution and transformation. On an
implementation basis, information is mostly represented as a set of
triples (subject, predicate, object - similar to "noun verb object" in
natural language), that allows machines to connect terms to one
another. The relationships between the subjects and objects is often
what gives the data its "meaning", and allows for the bootstrapping
process to occur - for example "Zip in William's system is equivalent
to Zip in Aaron's system, which is kinda like Postal Code in Sean's
system". Because the URIs are being used to represent the resources,
systems can grow on a globally decentralized basis, similar to
hypertext documentation systems on the early WWW.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Sunday, 20 May 2001 11:23:41 UTC