What Exactly is the Semantic Web?

A large international effort that has agreed on the format of how to represent data and its inter-relationships.

With this agreement on standard formats, many tools and technologies are being built to deliver the benefits.

  • Many Models now freely available encoding great domain expertise
  • Models Accelerate Understanding and questioning of new domains
  • Semantic Inferencing lets you find hidden relationships between your data
Faster Better Answers - No Programming
Business people use data distributed in spreadsheets, databases and web sites.

Writing a report or asking a question that has to integrate these together requires lengthy cutting and pasting or costly programming - the immediacy of getting to an answer is lost.

The Semantic Web is a worldwide project involving thousands of collaborative researchers that have developed technology to completely solve this problem in 3 steps:

  • Step 1 - Defined how pieces of data could be represented as abstract Concepts - a 'Customer' rather than a data table or a spreadsheet
  • Step 2 - Defined how Concepts could be connected using abstract Relationships - a Customer 'Buys A' Product.
  • Step 3 - Defined how Models could be built by by linking Concepts together with Relationships in a Daisy Chain.

By analogy, in a Graphical Model of US Airport Hubs and interconnecting flight routes, the knowledge of how everything is connected is implicitly built in to the Model.

Specify a flight from Seattle to Key West and the available flights are obvious from the model - there is no need to tell the Pilot which runway to use - low level knowledge is built into the Model.

The tremendous immediate benefit is that any Business person can now answer sophisticated questions by simply clicking on a Daisy Chain of the Concepts and Relationships in a Model

 

What is the benefit of the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web simplifies the process of asking questions involving Personal, Web or Organisational Data.

For example, the Semantic Web will enable you to do the following tasks easily:

  • Link  multiple Excel Spreadsheets together and ask questions that span across all of them
  • Visualise Databases such as Oracle and ask sophisticated questions without programming
  • Exchange models of data with colleagues to extend your expertise and save time