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Tik-76.275 Seminar on Knowledge Engineering, Spring 2001 (2 cp)The Semantic Web - The evolution towards machine-understandable content formats |
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| Seminar area |
The Web technologies are designed for automatic processing but the currently used content formats (that is, various formats for representing text, pictures, audio, and video) are meant for human interpretation. The meaning of the content represented in these formats is opaque to automatic tools. Any machine interpretation of the content is difficult if not impossible. The practical consequence of the use of unstructured content formats is that many distributed processes that occur over the Web require human interventions at almost every step. With more structured and sematically better-defined content formats, many steps in resource discovery, electronic commerce, Web-based collaboration, etc. might be automated. The Web Consortium has actively developed structured representations for documents and for data. XML was originally designed to be better and more modular format for hypertext documents but since it has increasingly been used for data representation purposes too. RDF, on the other hand, was designed to goal to enable the representation of data over the Web, in the form of directed labeled graphs. Recently, however, also XML has increasingly been used to represent data, especially in the area of electronic commerce. The Web Consortium has recently (Feb 9, 2001) launched the Semantic Web Activity. There are many ongoing research projects and commercial developments that use XML and/or RDF (see, for example, the pages of XML.com, XML.ORG, Sun, or IBM). This seminar tries to provide on overview of the key technologies and some of their current application areas. |
| Background material |
Below is a list of introductory articles to the topics of the seminar.
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| Seppo Törmä Last modified: Wed Feb 14 14:20:51 EET 2001 |