The beginning of the nineties of the last century witnessed the birth of the World Wide Web, a network of resources and information connected, in a way that attracts us and arouses our curiosity at the same time, and makes us stand in amazement, watching how that strange device, the computer, responds to us. In 1992, when Tim Berners-Lee presented the first demo of the Web to his audience of scientists, no one could even imagine the role and scope of the World Wide Web shortly. Today, the World Wide Web has become for many people an indispensable way to provide and search for information.
The World Wide Web is the largest database in the world, which is usually understood by the user, not the computer. It also lacks a semantic structure that maintains the interdependence between its components. Scientists believe that searches on the Internet at present depend on keywords, meaning that information is retrieved on the text search available for all available links and addresses. Here we are talking about the Semantic Web as the third generation of the World Wide Web, which gives you the information in a more coherent manner than the first and second generations.
1- What do you know about semantic theory (semantics)?
Recently, there has been an increase in talk about “semantic theory”, which means the study of words, in that the semantic classifications have accuracy and depth in meaning and depend on some contexts. Advancements in “lexical semantics” underpinned the development of “semantic domain theory” and “semantic network” or “semantic circuits of networks,” those strategies that organize words according to interrelated semantic meanings.
The semantic domain theory suggests that the content of a language's vocabulary is a language that is processed not simply as an aggregation of independent words, but as an interconnected set of networks or relationships between words. It is worth mentioning that these words may be grouped (linked to each other) according to certain criteria, for example, the word animals can be grouped concerning natural properties and so on by analogy.
2- What is the semantic web?
The semantic preparation as a whole consists of a series of techniques, such as semantic feature analysis, commands, pictograms, and semantic maps.
While the research stated that the word “semantic” refers to “meaning” or “understanding”. The main difference between the semantic web and other technologies such as relational databases is that the semantic site is concerned with meaning, not with the data structure.
And the semantic web, or what is known as the semantic web, or the web with meaning, and what is meant by that is its reliance on software that can define what is meant by the data provided by the World Wide Web (the Web), with the help of what is known as concept maps ontology.
The semantic web is one of the branches of artificial intelligence, and it is a revolution in the world of the web, as it allows the browser or proxy programs to search for information, and thus the information processing process is based on computers instead of humans.
The Semantic Web is not a separate web in itself but an extension of the existing Web, where information has clear meanings and is better enabled for computers and people to work collaboratively.
The concept can be simplified as the positive dissemination of information in the form of an electronic form on the Internet.
Semantic Web services are self-descriptive, self-contained, and independent modular applications that can be accessed over the Internet. The Web Services Description Language does not include a semantic description, it defines the structure of message components using XML Schema constructs.
3- Semantic Web Objectives
One of the main goals of semantic web design and technology is to help create maps of data and information on the web. One of the goals of the Semantic Web is also to discover and solve problems with the user's need for information. Many researchers attributed the importance of searching on the web through keywords to three objectives:
- Discover the actual meaning of each of the keywords in the input keyword group.
- Develop an interpretation of it and express it in formal language to control the problem of the need for information.
- Allowing the user to access the appropriate information system(s) transparently, taking into account the different characteristics that the accessed systems may exhibit.
4- The journey of searching for information using the semantic web
Semantic research begins with discovering and establishing the connotations of the explicit input keywords, and then the semantics behind each of the entered keywords is discovered by considering their potential connotations as well as the potential connotations of their context (the rest of the keywords).
In the search for information through the semantic web, the researcher goes through the following stages:
A- Discovering the meaning of keywords
In the beginning, the exact meaning of the word “significant” is clarified, which is the exact meaning of the keyword in a context, i.e. determining the meaning of the keyword through the keywords surrounding it.
In our system, the semantic is the set of interrelated fields formed by the term itself, it is the descriptive context that consists of the list of possible synonyms (with their generic resource identifiers/URLs) and descriptive information related to that term.
B- Extracting the meaning of the keywords
The system obtains the possible meanings of each keyword by consulting a dynamic set of descriptions or description repositories, to find descriptive terms that grammatically fit the keyword or one of its synonyms. For each matching operation, the system creates a semantic that is semantically enriched by the descriptive terms of the corresponding synonyms, and also by searching the set of descriptors. As a result of this step, we get a list of candidate keyword semantics for each keyword used.
C- Enriching the meaning of keywords and eliminating repetition
In the list of meanings obtained in the previous step, there may be repeated meanings, given that the meaning of each of the keywords is formulated according to the terms extracted from the different descriptions. Accordingly, an incremental algorithm was used to harmonize the meanings of different keywords and merge them when there is a sufficient amount of similarity between them, thus avoiding repetition. Here, the system calculates the probability of synonymy that takes into account the linguistic and structural characteristics of the source descriptions.
D- Clarifying and demystifying the meanings of keywords
The clarification process is carried out to select the most likely target meaning for each keyword used, by looking at the possible meanings of the rest of the keywords.
E- Semantic processing
Once the user has the potential investigations, the semantics processor filters out the irrelevant words with the help of heuristic DL. This is done, through DL expressions that define the search language and that enable us to perform the appropriate investigation, to obtain the appropriate expression that is consistent with the semantics for each search operation.
Note: (DL = DESCRIPTIVE LOGICS, meaning descriptive logarithms).
5- The benefits of the semantic web for the learner
Good semantic models can provide the user with several benefits such as:
- Ease of retrieval of information by the same user.
- Expressions are representations that enable us to compute new information from pre-existing information (inference and inquiry).
- Supporting the linguistic representation of the potential variation between information systems, because semantic models can be found logically by making maps between semantic schemas that are compatible with each other.
- Expressing data in a representation that “speaks” to human minds as well as to computers.
6- Semantic search engines
The search engines agree between the beneficiary's query and the document data included in the system and retrieve results that match the query. Whereas traditional search engines such as Google, Vista, and Yahoo depend on the matching of terms and their similarity between the query and the text, we find that semantic search engines take into account the meanings and semantics of the terms and do not just match them, and thus the results of the latter are more relevant to the inquiry, and there are many semantic search engines available through the Internet, including:
A- HAKIA search engine
It presents the results in order using algorithms that assign a score to the results based on their degree of relevance and conformity to the concept in the query.
The following figure shows an image of the search engine interface:
B- Cosmix
The search engine presents the patron with a dashboard of the content and, in addition to the concept categories, provides information about the topic as well, and a mix of links, videos, and tweets to the patron.
The following figure shows the Cosmix search engine interface:
C- exhale
It is an image search engine that allows the search to be narrowed depending on the size, colour, and content of images. Thus, it helps to solve problems related to searching for image content, especially in cases where link analysis is not sufficient to provide what the beneficiary is searching for with sufficient accuracy.
The following figure displays the Exelid search engine interface:
The difference between semantic search engines and traditional search engines
We may now wonder what is the difference between semantic search engines and the most famous traditional engine, Google. Semantic search engines differ from their traditional counterparts in several aspects, including concerning technologies.
Maps or ontology to provide the closest matching results for your search, as it removes ambiguity from terms and works on analyzing them accurately and reaching the closest, while the Google engine gives everything related to your search word randomly and with a greater number of results.
7- The Semantic Web and the educational process
If we are talking about semantics and obtaining information through the semantic web, then we are close to its application in the educational process, as there is almost no student who has not searched for information through the semantic web, and from our previous presentation, we find that semantic search and its various engines are a useful tool for research. About the information, biographies, drawings and photos related to it. For example, a student or teacher in science may use it to explore living beings in different parts of the world, and it may be used in history to search for specific personalities, so the semantic search gives everything related to the personality and the battles he fought...