# The Semantic Web



## gully_foyle (Jun 22, 2011)

Anyone here up on semantic web technologies? I am doing a lot of work with OWL and RDF, but have precious few people I can put my naive questions to.


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## biodroid (Jun 22, 2011)

I work with J2EE and XML technologies, not sure what OWL and RDF is.


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## gully_foyle (Jun 23, 2011)

OWL is the Web Ontology Language, RDF is the Resource Description Format framework. RDF is a form of XML where everything is expressed as triples: subject, predicate, object, e.g. subject:gully_foyle predicate:reads object:SF. OWL uses RDF to describe an ontology, which is a vocabulary describing a domain. e.g. An SFF ontology would describe concepts like Science Fiction and Fantasy. Science Fiction would be subclassed into Space Opera, Time Travel, Cyberpunk, etc. Fantasy would be sub-classed into Dwarves and Everything Else. If we wanted to build an information system about SFF, e.g. a semantic web version of chrons, we would agree to use this ontology to describe the SFF domain. We could also extend it if we feel it isn't comprehensive enough. The idea would be that if you have your own web profile that says you like the SFF Ontology Term: Space Opera, autonomous agents can go to places like the chrons and retrieve specific information for you. Anyway, that's my understanding, I'm still a bit of a noob. A good example of information structured using RDF is dbpedia (http://dbpedia.org).


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