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Semantic web and its purpose

Short answer

The Semantic Web gives data explicit machine-readable meaning using RDF, OWL, and URIs, enabling automatic integration and reasoning. For example, a computer can query that Mount Everest has height 8848 m and is located in Nepal from RDF data, answering complex questions without human reading.

What is Semantic Web? Explain the purpose of semantic web with suitable example.

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web, proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning in a machine-readable form, so that computers can understand, share and combine data from different sources, not only display it. It uses technologies such as URI, XML, RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL and ontologies.

Layers: URI/Unicode -> XML -> RDF -> RDFS/OWL (ontology)
        -> Rules/SPARQL -> Logic, Proof, Trust

Purpose

  • Make web data understandable by software, not only by humans.
  • Allow automatic integration of data from many websites.
  • Support intelligent agents that search, compare and make decisions for users.
  • Give more accurate, meaning-based search results.
  • Enable reuse and sharing of data across applications (Linked Data).

Example

A human reading "Mount Everest is 8848 m high and located in Nepal" understands it. A normal web page is just text for the computer. In the Semantic Web, the fact is written as RDF triples (subject-predicate-object):

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://example.org/MountEverest">
  <ex:height>8848</ex:height>
  <ex:locatedIn rdf:resource="http://example.org/Nepal"/>
</rdf:Description>

Now a program asked "Which mountains in Nepal are higher than 8000 m?" can find the answer by itself. Similarly, a travel agent program could read flight, hotel and calendar data from different sites and book a trip automatically.

A keyword search for "jaguar" returns pages about both the car and the animal; with semantic markup the system knows which meaning is required.

✓ Answer checked by Claude Opus 5.5 (high effort)

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