Semantic Web

<Student Name>

<Name and Section # of course>

<Instructor Name>

<Date>
 Semantic Web and Knowledge Based System

Semantic Web is an extension of ordinary web and knowledge based system is a

database of information regarding a particular subject. The idea of semantic web is derived

from knowledge based system, which uses the techniques of Artificial Intelligence. Semantic

Web gives the result after gathering information from different databases on web. The

contrast between semantic web and knowledge based system is defined below.

Semantic Web

Semantic Web was introduced by Tim Berners Lee and is known to be an extension to

the World Wide Web1. It is like a semantic of all the information provided on internet, which

is understandable by the machines.

Semantic Web consists of different rules and principles, which allow mutual

information to be shared among different groups. It uses a unique designing technique. The

complete model of Semantic Web is not yet implemented fully and few elements are still left.

It is planned to implement them in future, when people will realize the need for this kind of

web. The elements of semantic web, which are implemented by now are, the Resource

Description Framework, different formats for data interchange, such as RDF/XML, N2, N-

Triples etc. And there are few notations used in this process, which includes RDF Schema

and OWL. OWL stands for Ontology Web Language2. These formats are used to give some

explanations about the ideas, terms and relationships about the knowledge based systems.

The main purpose behind the creation of Semantic Web was to make computers

understand and analyze the data, without direct human instructions. Websites are designed in

a way, which leads from one page to another directly and thus not need the machine to
1
Berners-Lee, Tim; James Hendler and Ora Lassila (May 17, 2001). "The Semantic Web". Scientific American
Magazine. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web&print=true. Retrieved on 2009-04-18.
2
Liyang Yu (2007-06-14). Introduction to Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services. CRC Press.
analyze the information. Tim Berner Lee wants to create a web, where computers will

analyze the data on the web. Data includes the contents, links and transactions between

people and computers, and thus it can be made possible by Semantic Web. He wanted our day

to day routine to be handled and organized by machine (computer) and gave the idea of

intelligent agents. This will make machine to communicate with other machines, which

requires the sharing of data and information among them.

There are different languages, used for publishing, including Resource Description

Framework, Web Ontology Language and XML (Extensible Markup Language)3. Hypertext

Markup Language is used to define links between all the above mentioned languages.

Knowledge Based System

Knowledge Based System is a computer system, used for problem solving and uses

Artificial Intelligence and uses different databases of knowledge in this regard. This includes

the computerized collection and organization of data. It is easy to retrieve the knowledge and

information from this kind of database, as compare to the ordinary one.

Semantic Web in Contrast of Knowledge Based System

Semantic Web uses the techniques of knowledge based systems is the use of

resources. The main difference between Semantic Web and knowledge based system is that

the graphs of semantic web are decentralized, as compare to the knowledge based system. It

is no different from the ordinary web, because its graph is also decentralized. This is

considered to be it’s advantage, because anyone can make a statement at any time like this.

There is no need to have centralized authority. Though, in this way, it becomes difficult to

find the required information.

3
A. Harth, J. Umbrich, and S. Decker. Multicrawler: A pipelined architecture for crawling and indexing semantic web data. 
In Proceedings of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). 2007.
 A major difference between the two is that knowledge based system is developed at a

small scale and thus involves a limited amount of data. Whereas Semantic Web involves a

large amount of data, therefore uses a large number of databases. Semantic web is

heterogeneous, due to many reasons, such as ontology, encoding, quality, complexity,

modeling and views.

Knowledge based system has an advantage of good quality over the semantic web. A

knowledge based system is developed on a smaller scale and is developed after proper

research and study. On the other hand, semantic web uses different databases from different

locations, and this implies that the result quality will be affected due to this. Therefore, the

information received from semantic web is less trustable as compare to the one gained from

knowledge based system.

Another advantage of knowledge based system over semantic web is that they are

developed after thorough research and study and thus are developed more strongly as

compare to the semantic web. The models and views used in knowledge based systems are

more powerful and organized. It is a proper system for a specific subject as compare to the

semantic web, which takes information from different locations and then gives out the result,

which might not be of good quality, but it can carry out more complex tasks and can

manipulate large amount of data over the web. Semantic web is useful in a situation where

logical reasoning becomes less important as compare to the scale and amount of data4,

therefore more efforts should be made to improve the quality of results in semantic web.

4
Dean Allemang, James Hendler (2008-05-09). Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling
in RDFS and OWL. Morgan Kaufmann.
 References

A. Harth, J. Umbrich, and S. Decker. Multicrawler: A pipelined architecture for crawling and

indexing semantic web data. In Proceedings of the International Semantic Web Conference

(ISWC). 2007.

Berners-Lee, Tim; James Hendler and Ora Lassila (May 17, 2001). "The Semantic Web".

Scientific American Magazine. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-

web&print=true. Retrieved on 2009-04-18.

Dean Allemang, James Hendler (2008-05-09). Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist:

Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL. Morgan Kaufmann.

Liyang Yu (2007-06-14). Introduction to Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services. CRC

Press.