PricewaterhouseCoopers forecast the Semantic Web
The freely available PricewaterhouseCoopers Spring 2009 Technology Forecast explains the value of the Semantic Web and Linked Data in the context of Enterprise applications, presenting interviews with leaders in the field and outlining how CIOs and individual departments can introduce Semantic Web technologies into their organizations.
Forecasts include:
- “During the next three to five years, we forecast a transformation of the enterprise data management function driven by explicit engagement with data semantics” and
- “PricewaterhouseCoopers believes a Web of data will develop that fully augments the document Web of today”.
W3C standards providing the foundation for this Web of data include URIs, RDF, RDF Schema (RDFS), the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Semantic Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL).
“URIs are more specific in a Semantic Web context than URLs, often including a hash that points to a thing such as an individual musician, a song of hers, or the label she records for within a page, rather than just the page itself.”
“RDF takes the data elements identified by URIs and makes statements about the relationship of one element to another.”
Each statement is a triple, a subject-predicate-object combination.
Ontologies (based on RDFS and OWL) describe the characteristics of these RDF data elements and their relationships within specific domains, facilitating machine interpretability of the data content.
“In this universe of nouns and verbs, the verbs articulate the connections, or relationships, between nouns. Each noun then connects as a node in a networked structure, one that scales easily because of the simplicity and uniformity of its Web-like connections.”
The Web of data approach clearly benefits a company such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) which “links to URIs at DBpedia.org, a version of the structured information on Wikipedia, to enrich sites such as its music site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/)”. It also links MusicBrainz for information about artists and recording.
As described by Tom Scott of BBC Earth:
“The relationship between the BBC content, the DBpedia content, and MusicBrainz is no more than URIs. We just have links between these things, and we have an ontology that describes how this stuff maps together.”
Other reviews of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Spring 2009 Technology Forecast include:
- Enterprises, Struggling to Manage Your Data? Try The Semantic Web
- PWC report on Semantic Web
- Semantic Web and Enterprise: PricewaterhouseCooper’s call to a Linked Data future
Tom Scott has a presentation on Linking bbc.co.uk to the Linked Data cloud and the article DBpedia Examples using Linked Data and Sparql provides a simple example of using SPARQL to query Dbpedia.
Tags: Semantic Web
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You have lionked the incorrect entry in Wikipedia for “ontology” as evidenced by the infomrational disclaimer at the top of this page:
This article is about ontology in philosophy. For the concept in information science, see ontology (information science).
You would probably wanted to link here –>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(computer_science)
Hi Davera, and -λογία: science, study, theory) is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general” since it conveys that the “study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general” is an ongoing human activity, with the information science aspect a recent addition.
Your right, in this context http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science) is the more relevant entry for “ontology”.
I’ve updated it accordingly but I have to admit that I still favor the more philosophical definition of an Ontology ( from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology ), “Ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: of being
Thanks for the comment, Richard.