Week 11: Semantics Matter

Guest speaker Robin Fay gave a lecture on the Semantic Web in Week 10. Semantics is the study of meaning, usually the meaning of language. The idea behind the Semantic Web is to have machines understand what we mean. For example, doing an image search for socks. What you want is to only see images that have socks in them but what you might get are images from any page with the word socks in it. If we can add code describing our images to search engines then we could get only images with socks and even specify socks for feet (as opposed to wind socks).

We didn't have time to get too deep into it (Robin said it gets technical and a quick search proves her right) so here are three sites that have more information.

Semantic Overflow: This site's sole purpose is to answer questions about the Semantic Web. Some are technical questions like "Is it possible to list the named graphs using a SPARQL query?" and some are non-technical like "Isn’t the “Semantic Web” overrated?" Unfortunately 'technical' and 'non-technical' aren't tags that anyone is using to describe their questions (or something similar) so you can't just browse questions just about programming or questions just about the Semantic Web itself. (It may or may not be irony but it does highlight one of the criticisms of the Semantic Web: it requires people to tag or mark up the data in a useful way.)

It's only a few days old so there aren't a lot of questions yet.

Semantic Web: A wiki for Semantic Web topics. The Getting Started page has links for books, tutorials, and videos. If you drill down to specific languages and tools you can get to the official site for the individual or organization that created it.

Semantic Web - The Voice of Semantic Web Business: This site has articles about businesses and web sites using technologies for the Semantic Web. I think this is a good resource for someone who's just curious about this topic because sites don't necessarily say on their site, "Hey, this is a semantic-powered site!". There's also articles about business trends and news related to the Semantic Web.

For example, there's an article about hiring trends for semantic-related jobs and an article about a site called Book of Odds.

The Semantic Web Gang - Prefer to get your news in an audible format? The Semantic Web Gang produce podcasts of their monthly round-table discussions. The site has links to all the resources they refer to in each podcast.