In this week’s blog I am going to look at how Semantic Web is trying to enable ‘users to find, share, and combine information more easily’- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web Reference from Wikipedia. This in turn makes it relatively easier obviously to search things up on the web. I will also be looking at how through tagging various things on the web we are, starting to teach our computers exactly what things are.
Semantic web is an ideal look of what the future may hold for the internet as we know it. By combining information on the web it makes it very easier for, research to happen and allow many of us to share our documents. Data journalism fits nicely into semantic web as; data journalism also links together six different concepts which help research. The following listed areas are referenced from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_journalism:
Computer assisted reporting and data-driven journalism, where journalists make use of large databases to produce stories.
Serious games, in the sense that they take interaction a step further.
Database journalism or structured journalism, an information management system where pieces of information are organized in a database (as opposed to a traditional story-centric organizational structure).
Data journalism is a like a subsidiary in the Semantic web as there are many ways and factors that make up the method. As we use computers and the internet specifically, we don’t exactly think how it is works but we love to complain when it’s taking its time. For many computers now we use HTML in our web browsers which resort to images and videos being uploaded on to the web. But the computer isn’t able to read the documents; it is just human readable documents.
On the other hand ‘The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or airplane parts.
These technologies are combined in order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents. Thus, content may manifest itself as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases, or as markup within documents (particularly, in Extensible HTML (XHTML) interspersed with XML, or, more often, purely in XML, with layout or rendering cues stored separately). The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e., to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content. In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and helping computers to perform automated information gathering and research.’ Reference from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web.
Using the internet today it is very common to tag things such as photos on social networking sites and, music to a certain genre on YouTube. So semantic web is on the right path making things much easier when looking for certain documents like; photos, video and even web pages. I personally think it is a great way for the web to transition into the new stage of evolving and, I know this would be a great success. Over the past approximately 5 years I have noticed tagging become a major part of our digital culture, for example; tagging of pictures on Facebook etc. So I don’t really find a problem with people having to adjust to any changes if they were to start using semantic web, as it would make research much easier online.
No comments:
Post a Comment