Introduction to this site, what is the Semantic Web

Greetings and welcome to my blog.
About myself: I am a professional software engineer with over 28 years experience in the field specializing in Software Configuration Management, Software Quality Assurance and Software Process Engineering. I am currently employed by a medium sized corporation and as an adjunct professor at a local university.

What this blog is:
This blog will be dedicated to a current class I am taking as part of a Doctorate of Engineering in Software Engineering. The topic is CSE 8394, Readings and Investigations in Software Application Development for the Spring 2009 semester.

Topic of study: What is the Semantic Web

Let's get started, then:

The Wikipedia definition is as follows:
The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.
At its core, the semantic web comprises a set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that are yet to be implemented or realized. Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications. Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

So what does this mean to the average person (like myself) who has heard this phrase for the first time? Well let's look at it this way ...

The definition of semantics is this "The study or science of meaning in language." This will be a very interesting topic for me as I also studied linguistics as part of my undergraduate degree and linguistics is "the scientific study of language ". Of course linguistics covers a wide range of language characteristics as well, such as the study of the nature, structure, and variation of language, including phonetics, phonology, and morphology, and answers the question of "what is language and how is it represented in the mind?". Or in the case of semantic web technologies, how is it represented to the user to help them find what they are looking for as quickly as possible?

With the overwhelming amount of data available on today's web, it can be very time consuming (and intimidating) to find exactly what one is looking for. So the semantic web I imagine will take the web search engine a step further and help that user find what they are looking for quicker and give them suggested results to match. A good example of this in action I think is the Google search of a topic. Have you noticed when you first start entering your search words, as soon as Google recognizes it, it pops up the entire word before you've finished typing it. And for multiple word searches it even thinks ahead for you to give you multiple choices before you've finished!

Let's try it:
Open a Google window and in the search field start typing 'why do dogs ...'. Look at the results below the search window that pop up! Amazing that the search engine has given suggestions for you to search on, based on the semantic phrase component you've entered. So now you can easily find out why dogs ... eat grass, poop, lick, howl, bark, etc.

Hmmm, now this is intelligent language recognition at work on the web ... and semantically correct.