Well, first of all we should know about semantic web? What exactly it means? Semantic web has been defined as a project, which intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by putting documents with computer process able meaning i.e. semantics on WWW (World Wide Web). The main intention is to create meta data, describing the data that will enable computers to process the meaning of things. If computers are equipped with semantics, they will be capable of solving complex semantical optimization problems.
For computers to solve semantical problems, the information available on the web needs to be annotated with descriptions and relationships. Prime examples of semantics comprise categorization of objects and its attributes. The problem of annotating data is really very complex and far being solved completely. If instantly, computer can return all relevant results, we can save a ton of time. Although merely having semantics and knowing all relationships between the data is not really enough to do that.
Thus, the other essential part of Semantic web is the one, which will facilitate productivity i.e. the set of persistent personal preferences. Once, the computer acknowledges your preferences and has semantic representation of it online, it can run an algorithm to render you accurate, precise and personalized results.
RDF, OWL and the mathematical approach to annotation
Now days, there are billions and trillions of unstructured HTML pages that contain no annotations and meta data. RDF is an XML based language which enables description of relationships via predicates. The subject represents the resource and the predicate represents traits or aspects of the resource and expresses a relationship between subject and object.
OWL is XML based language used for describing and reasoning ontologies. 3 flavors of OWL are there – OWL Lite, OWL DL and OWL Full. Each of them symbolizes a different side of trade off between expressiveness and computability.
Microformats
Lot of individuals are now opting a different kind of approach i.e. Microformats after discerning the complexity of RDF and OWL. The main aim of Microformats is to embed the basic semantics right into HTML pages. As compared to RDF and OWL, it is not very expressive but very compact in nature and uses XHTML functionalities to add semantics to the pages.
Conclusion – Is Web 3.0 is Semantic Web?
Not really. As it takes some time to annotate the world’s information, then to capture personal information in the appropriate way and finally to enable them in different forms of applications.