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Semantic Web
Introduction To Semantic Web

Dr. Ahmed Slama

COURSE OUTLINE
1 • LECTURE 1: Introduction of Semantic Web

2 • LECTURE 2: The semantic web and the role of agents

3 • LECTURE 3: Semantic Web Tools

4 • LECTURE 4: Metadata: Syntax, Structure, Semantics

5 • LECTURE 5: Ontologies

6 • LECTURE 6: SEMANTIC WEB RULE LANGUAGE

7 • LECTURE 7: SPARQL QUERY LANGUAGE and Reasoning on the web

8 • LECTURE 8: LINKED OPEN DATA (LoD)

9 • LECTURE 9: SEMANTIC ANNOTATION TECHNOLOGIES

10 • LECTURE 10: Social web and semantic web

11 • LECTURE 11: Trust

Semantic Web

 The Semantic Web is a vision for the future of the Web in which information is given
explicit meaning, making it easier for machines to automatically process and integrate
information available on the Web.
 The Semantic Web builds on
- XML's ability to define customized tagging schemes
- RDF approach to represent data.
 The first level above RDF for the Semantic Web is an ontology language which is used to
describe the meaning of terminology used in Web documents.
Ontology: Origins and History

 In Philosophy, fundamental branch of metaphysics

 Studies “being” or “existence” and their basic categories

 Aims to find out what entities and types of entities exist

Ontology in Information Science
 An ontology is an engineering artefact consisting of:

 A vocabulary used to describe (a particular view of) some domain

 An explicit specification of the intended meaning of the vocabulary.

 Often includes classification based information

 Constraints capturing background knowledge about the domain

 Ideally, an ontology should:

 Capture an understanding model of a domain of interest

 Provide a formal and machine readable model

Ontology Languages for the Web
 Semantic Web effort led to development of “resource description” language(s)
 E.g., RDF, and later RDF Schema (RDFS)

 RDFS is recognisable as an ontology language

 Classes and properties
 Sub/super-classes (and properties)
 Range and domain (of properties)

 But RDFS too weak to describe resources in sufficient detail, e.g.:

 No existence/cardinality constraints
 No transitive, inverse or symmetrical properties
 No localized range and domain constraints
 Difficult to provide reasoning support
From RDFS to OWL
 Two languages developed to address deficiencies & problems of RDFS:

 OIL: developed by group of European researchers

 DAML-ONT: developed by group of US researchers

 Efforts merged to produce DAML+OIL

 Development carried out by “Joint EU/US Committee on Agent Markup Languages”

 DAML+OIL submitted to W3C as basis for standardization

 Web-Ontology (WebOnt) Working Group formed

 WebOnt developed OWL language based on DAML+OIL

 OWL now a W3C recommendation (i.e., a standard)

Web Ontology Language (OWL )

 The language used to build ontologies that describe information on the Semantic Web.

 OWL is intended to be used when the information needs to be processed by applications, as

opposed to situations where the content only needs to be presented to humans

 OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages:

o OWL Lite
o OWL DL
o OWL Full

» OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF,
and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics
OWL Web Ontology Language cont.
Common Ontologies
OWL Sublanguages

» OWL Lite
 OWL-Lite is the syntactically simplest sub-language. It is intended to be used in situations where only
a simple class hierarchy and simple constraints are needed.

» OWL DL
 provides users who need the maximum expressiveness while retaining number of constraints on the
use of the OWL language constructs such as :
 OWL DL requires a separation between classes, datatypes, datatype properties, object properties. This
means that, a class cannot be at the same time an individual.

» OWL Full
 provides users who need maximum expressiveness and free unrestricted use of RDF constructs.
 OWL Full allows classes to be treated as individuals.
 ex: it is legal in OWL Full to use a “Ferrari" identifier as a class name and as an individual name (ex: an
instance of the class CarType).
OWL
Sublanguage
s cont.
OWL Web Ontology Language

OWL requires adherence to two important assumptions:

• Open world assumption:

 The open world assumption states that the truth of a statement is independent of whether it is
known. In other words, not knowing that a statement is explicitly true does not imply that the
statement is false

• No unique names assumption:

 The no unique names assumption states that unless explicitly stated otherwise, you cannot assume
that resources that are identified by different URIs are different.
OWL Web Ontology Language cont.

• The ontology contains

 a series of classes
 property definitions
 descriptions of individuals
 data range descriptions.

• A class is a collection of individuals.

• A property is a relationship, and it can be either between two individuals or between an individual and a
literal value.

• An individual is an instance (also known as a member) of a class.

OWL Web Ontology Language cont.

OWL class

• Consists of some optional annotations followed by zero or more constraints that

restrict the membership of the class.

• These restrictions represent descriptions of the class and form the basis of the class
definition.
OWL Web Ontology Language cont.

• The following OWL vocabulary terms can be used to describe a class:

 rdfs:subClassOf Relationship between two classes that states that one class is more
specific than the other.

 owl:equivalentClass Relationship that specifies that the extensions of two classes are
equivalent.

 owl:Thing The class of all individuals.

OWL Web Ontology Language cont.
Annotation properties

• Annotation properties can be used to describe resources in the ontology, including classes,
properties, individuals, ontologies, and data types.

• The following is a list of the annotation properties that are provided in OWL to describe new
annotation properties:

 rdfs:label :property that provides a label that represents the resource.

 rdfs:comment: property that provides a text description of the resource.

 rdfs:seeAlso :property that specifies a resource that provides additional information.

 rdfs:isDefinedBy : property that specifies a resource that defines the subject resource.
OWL Web Ontology Language cont.

Properties

• OWL properties are used to establish relationships between resources

 owl:ObjectProperty The class of all properties that link two individuals.

 owl:DatatypeProperty The class of all properties that link an individual with a literal value.

 rdfs:domain Specifies the domain of a statement that is using the property

 rdfs:range Specifies the range of a statement that is using the property

 rdfs:subPropertyOf Relationship between two properties that specifies that one property is more

specific than the other.

OWL Web Ontology Language cont.

Datatypes

• represent ranges of data values that are identified using URIs.

• OWL allows you to use a number of predefined datatypes, of which most are defined in the
XML Schema Definition (xsd) namespace.

• In addition to the predefined datatypes, OWL introduces the ability to define your own
datatypes.
OWL Web Ontology Language cont.

OWL Properties ‘s characteristics :

• A functional property can have only one member in the range for any member of the domain.
EX: hasGender is marked as functional so that each person can have only one gender.

• An Inverse functional : each member of the domain can correspond only one member of the
range.
EX: idFor property could be marked as Inverse functional, since you want each ID to correspond
to only one Person.

• Transitive This means that "x hasProperty y" and "y hasProperty z" implies "x hasProperty z".

• Symmetric This means that "x hasProperty y" implies "y hasProperty x".

• Asymmetric This means that if "x hasProperty y" then "y hasProperty x" cannot be true as well.
OWL Web Ontology Language cont.

Individuals

• Individuals in OWL are members of classes.

• The following OWL vocabulary terms are used to describe individuals:

 rdf:type A relationship that specifies the class of which an individual is a member.

 owl:sameAs A relationship that specifies that two individuals are the same individual.

 owl:differentFrom A relationship that specifies that two individuals are not the same
individual.
Why Ontology Reasoning?

 Given key role of ontologies in many applications, it is essential to provide tools and services to help
users:

 Design and maintain high quality ontologies, e.g.:

 Meaningful — all named classes can have instances
 Correct — captures intuitions of domain experts
 Minimally redundant — no unintended synonyms

 Answer queries over ontology classes and instances, e.g.:

 Find more general/specific classes
 Retrieve individuals/tuples matching a given query
Applications of Ontologies

 Medicine
 Building/maintaining terminologies such as Snomed, NCI & Galen

Central Sulcus

Parietal Lobe

Frontal Lobe
Occipital
Lobe
Temporal Lobe

Lateral Sulcus
Applications of Ontologies

 Organizing complex and semi-structured information

 UN-FAO, NASA, Ordnance Survey, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, …
Applications of Ontologies
 Military/Government
 DARPA, NSA, NIST, SAIC, MoD, Department of Homeland Security, …
 The Semantic Web and so-called Semantic Grid
THANKS
You can find me at
 [email protected]