The Semantic Web in Education (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE

Description

What happens when the read-write web gets smart enough to help us organize and evaluate the information it provides?

The mantra of the information age has been “The more information the better!” But what happens when we search the web and get so much information that we can’t sort through it, let alone evaluate it? Enter the semantic web, or Web 3.0. Among other things, the semantic web makes information more meaningful to people by making it more understandable to machines.

Consider a simple example. If you want to know my mailing address, currently you need to go to my web page and root around until you find it. That’s because the current coding system used to build web pages, largely HTML, displays information without identifying it in any meaningful way. That is, my address is not coded as “an address,” it is simply presented as a series of characters on the screen. Contrast this with a database about your friends that contains a specific column called “mailing address.” Even if your database included millions of entries, locating my address is easy.

Web 3.0 makes the leap from “display only” to meaningful information by tagging information with descriptors like “mailing address.” Further, it allows users to find relationships between tagged information using inference rules and data organizational tools called “ontologies” that provide logic and structure to the information embedded in web pages. As a result, machines can do a lot of the information grunt work currently required of humans. When it comes to a web search, for example, the semantic web makes a reasonable pass at collating, synthesizing, and cross-referencing the results for you. It does this by employing software agents that can locate and combine information from many sources to build meaningful information collages. Simply tell your agent ...

Original URL

http://www.educause.edu/EQ/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/TheSemanticWebinEducation/163437

http://www.educause.edu/EQ/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/TheSemanticWebinEducation/163437