The Web as we know it today will not be the Web as we know it tomorrow. The Web of today is oriented towards the universal accessibility of files (e.g. web pages, images). The Web of today can be thought of as a large-scale, distributed file system. The Web of tomorrow will encode any datum (e.g. strings, integers, dates). The Web of tomorrow can be thought of as a large-scale, distributed database. This talk will discuss the the future Web with special focus on the supporting standards and application visions.
1. Evolving the Web into a Giant Global Database
Marko A. Rodriguez
T-5, Center for Nonlinear Studies
Los Alamos National Laboratory
http://markorodriguez.com
February 12, 2009
2. Abstract
The Web as we know it today will not be the Web as we know it
tomorrow. The Web of today is oriented towards the universal accessibility
of files (e.g. web pages, images). The Web of today can be thought of as
a large-scale, distributed file system. The Web of tomorrow will encode
any datum (e.g. strings, integers, dates). The Web of tomorrow can be
thought of as a large-scale, distributed database. This talk will discuss the
the future Web with special focus on the supporting standards and
application visions.
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
3. Outline
• The Space of Uniform Resource Identifiers
• The World Wide Web vs. the Semantic Web
• Relational Databases vs. Triple Stores
• Ontologies and Reasoning
• General-Purpose Computing on the Semantic Web
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
4. Outline
• The Space of Uniform Resource Identifiers
• The World Wide Web vs. the Semantic Web
• Relational Databases vs. Triple Stores
• Ontologies and Reasoning
• General-Purpose Computing on the Semantic Web
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
5. Internet Address Spaces
• The Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is the superclass of the Uniform
Resource Locator (URL) and Uniform Resource Name (URN).
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
6. The Uniform Resource Locator
• The set of all URLs is the address space of all resources that can be
located and retrieved on the Web. URLs denote where a resource is.
http://markorodriguez.com/index.html
∗ Domain name server (DNS): markorodriguez.com → 216.251.43.6
∗ http:// means GET at port 80,
∗ /index.html means the resource to get at that Internet location.
Web Server
index.html
markorodriguez.com
216.251.43.6
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
7. The Uniform Resource Name
• The set of all URNs is the address space of all resources within the urn:
namespace.
urn:uuid:bd93def0-8026-11dd-842be54955baa12
urn:issn:0892-3310
urn:doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2008.03.030
• Named resources need not be retrievable through the Web.
• URNs denote what a resource is.
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
8. The Uniform Resource Identifier
• The URI address space is an infinite space for all Internet resources.
http://markorodriguez.com/index.html
urn:issn:0892-3310
ftp://markorodriguez.com/private/markos_secrets.txt
http://www.lanl.gov#fluffy
• Imporant: URIs can denote concepts, instances, and datum.
lanl:fluffy lanl:fluffy_legs
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
9. The “Uniform Resource Graph”
• We can denote where something is, what something is, but how do we
denote how something relates to something else?
• How can we denote what something means, where meaning is determined
by its place within a larger relational structure?
URIs are like words. They denote things in the real or imaginary world.
Linking URIs is like defining words. Similar to how a dictionary defines
words in terms of other words.
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
10. Outline
• The Space of Uniform Resource Identifiers
• The World Wide Web vs. the Semantic Web
• Relational Databases vs. Triple Stores
• Ontologies and Reasoning
• General-Purpose Computing on the Semantic Web
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
11. Undirected Single-Relational Network
Human-D
Human-B
Human-F
Human-C
Human-A
Human-E
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
12. Directed Single-Relational Network
Article-D
Article-B
Article-F
Article-C
Article-A
Article-E
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
13. From the World Wide Web to the Semantic Web
• The World Wide Web is primarily concerned with the Hyper-Text
Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and with retrievable resources in the URL
address space.
• These retrievable resources are files: HTML documents, images, audio,
etc. The “web” is created when HTML documents contain URLs.
http://markorodriguez.com/
index.html
href
Resume.html href Home.html href Research.html
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
14. Directed Multi-Relational Network
Publisher-A
Article-A
publishedBy
authored editorOf Human-B
Journal-A
containedIn authored
Human-A
authored
Article-B
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
15. From the World Wide Web to the Semantic Web
• The Semantic Web is primarily concerned with URIs. If the World
Wide Web is the web of files, the Semantic Web is the web of concepts.
In other words, for the World Wide Web, the level of granularity is
the retrievable file. For the Semantic Web, it is the ideas in that file.
Moreover, these ideas are not necessarily contained in a file. There
existence is predicated on their URI. Their meaning is predicated on their
relationship to other URIs. The web of URIs is the Semantic Web.
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
16. The Resource Description Framework
• The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the standard for
representing the relationship between URIs and literals (e.g. float, string,
date time, etc.). I would have preferred the name “Uniform Resource
Graph” (URG).
• Relationships are directed, labeled links between URIs. A subject URI
points to an object URI or literal by means of a predicate URI.
subject predicate object
lanl:marko foaf:knows lanl:jhw
foaf:name foaf:name
"Marko A. Rodrigez"^^xsd:string "Jennifer H. Watkins"^^xsd:string
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
17. foaf:Organization "University of New
"Los Alamos National
Laboratory"^^xsd:string Mexico"^^xsd:string
rdf:type rdf:type
foaf:name foaf:name
foaf:Document
lanl:lanl unm:unm
rdf:type
foaf:member
foaf:member
urn:doi:10.1016/j.joi.2008.04.002
foaf:member
foaf:Person
foaf:publications
rdf:type rdf:type
lanl:marko foaf:knows lanl:jhw
foaf:name foaf:name
"Marko A. Rodrigez"^^xsd:string "Jennifer H. Watkins"^^xsd:string
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
18. The RDF Data Model and its Serializations
• RDF is a data model. As such, there exists many serializations
(encodings) of that model.
• RDF/XML is not RDF. It is a serialization of RDF. It is smart to, at all
costs, avoid learning RDF/XML as it is an unintuitive standard. Other
serializations include: N-TRIPLE, N3, TRIX, TRIG, ...
<http://www.lanl.gov/uc33c7c98> <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type> <http://www.mesur.org/schemas/2007-01/mesur#Journal> .
<http://www.lanl.gov/uc33c7c98> <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name> "Journal of Neuroscience Research"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string> .
<http://www.lanl.gov/uc33c7c98> <http://www.mesur.org/schemas/2007-01/mesur#hasDoi> "urn:doi:10.1002/(issn)1097-4547"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#anyURI> .
<http://www.lanl.gov/uc33c7c98> <http://www.mesur.org/schemas/2007-01/mesur#hasIssn> "urn:issn:0360-4012"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#anyURI> .
<http://www.lanl.gov/uc33c7c98> <http://www.mesur.org/schemas/2007-01/mesur#hasIssn> "urn:issn:1097-4547"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#anyURI> .
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
19. The Semantic Web is a Distributed Database
• The URI address space is distributed.
• URIs can denote datum.
• RDF denotes the relationships URIs.
• The Semantic Web’s foundational standard is RDF.
• Therefore, the Semantic Web is a distributed database.
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
20. The World Wide Web vs. the Semantic Web
Web Server Web Server
HTML href HTML
127.0.0.1 127.0.0.2
Web Server Triple Store
RDF foaf:knows
127.0.0.1 127.0.0.2
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
21. Linked Data Cloud1
ECS Sem-
South- Web-
ampton Central
updated
Music- Doap-
Audio- space Flickr
brainz
Scrobbler QDOS exporter SIOC
profiles
BBC BBC Magna-
Onto- SW
Later + John tune
Jamendo world
Conference
TOTP Peel FOAF Corpus
profiles Open-
Guides
Geo-
names Revyu
DBpedia RDF Book
US
Census Mashup
World
Data NEW! Fact- DBLP
book lingvoj
riese Berlin
NEW!
RKB
Euro- Explorer
stat
flickr
Gov- Wiki- Open wrappr
Track company Cyc
DBLP
Hannover
W3C Project
WordNet Guten-
berg
1
provided by Richard Cyganiak (richard@cyganiak.de)
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
22. Outline
• The Space of Uniform Resource Identifiers
• The World Wide Web vs. the Semantic Web
• Relational Databases vs. Triple Stores
• Ontologies and Reasoning
• General-Purpose Computing on the Semantic Web
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
23. Relational Databases vs. Triple Stores: Technology
• A relational databases’ (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle) natural
representation is a collection interlinked tables.
• A triple stores’ (e.g. OpenSesame, AllegroGraph, Neo4j) natural
representation is a multi-relational network, or graph.
Relational Database Triple Store
127.0.0.1 127.0.0.2
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
24. Relational Databases vs. Triple Stores: Culture
• Relational databases tend to not maintain public access points.
• Relational database users tend to not publish their schemas.
• Triple stores maintain public access points called SPARQL end-points.
• Triple store users tend to reuse and extend public schemas called
ontologies.
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
25. SQL vs. SPARQL
SELECT ?x WHERE {
?y foaf:name "Los Alamos National Laboratory"^^xsd:string .
?y foaf:member ?x .
?x foaf:knows ?z .
?z foaf:name "Marko A. Rodriguez"^^xsd:string }
SELECT p1.id
FROM person p1, organization o1 AS r1, person p2 WHERE
o1.name="Los Alamos National Laboratory" AND
o1.id = p1.member AND
p1.id = r1.id AND
r1.knows=p2.id AND
p2.name="Marko A. Rodriguez";
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
26. Outline
• The Space of Uniform Resource Identifiers
• The World Wide Web vs. the Semantic Web
• Relational Databases vs. Triple Stores
• Ontologies and Reasoning
• General-Purpose Computing on the Semantic Web
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
27. foaf:Organization "University of New
"Los Alamos National
Laboratory"^^xsd:string Mexico"^^xsd:string
rdf:type rdf:type
foaf:name foaf:name
foaf:Document
lanl:lanl unm:unm
rdf:type
foaf:member
foaf:member
urn:doi:10.1016/j.joi.2008.04.002
foaf:member
foaf:Person
foaf:publications
rdf:type rdf:type
lanl:marko foaf:knows lanl:jhw
foaf:name foaf:name
"Marko A. Rodrigez"^^xsd:string "Jennifer H. Watkins"^^xsd:string
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
28. Ontologies
• An ontology defines your domain of discourse.
• An ontology helps to define the types of abstract classes that exist in
your domain and the types of relationships that exist between instances
of those classes.
• An ontology allows you to infer implicit knowledge from explicit
knowledge.
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
29. "1"^^xsd:int owl:Restriction
lanl:Mammal
owl:maxCardinality rdf:type
rdf:subClassOf lanl:hasOwner owl:onProperty _:12345
rdf:type
rdf:type rdfs:subClassOf
foaf:Person
lanl:Dog
rdf:type
rdf:type rdf:type
lanl:jhw owl:differentFrom lanl:marko lanl:hasOwner lanl:fluffy
lanl:hasOwner
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
30. Outline
• The Space of Uniform Resource Identifiers
• The World Wide Web vs. the Semantic Web
• Relational Databases vs. Triple Stores
• Ontologies and Reasoning
• General-Purpose Computing on the Semantic Web
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
31. General-Purpose Computing on the Semantic Web
• It is possible to represent a virtual computing machine and software in
the Semantic Web.
• Given that the URI address space is distributed, the computing structures
are inherently distributed.
• Thus, the Semantic Web can be used as a giant computer – data,
programs, and virtual machines all within the same address space.
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
32. x = (3 ∗ 2) + 1
urn:uuid:
lanl:Push rdf:type neno:hasValue "1"^^xsd:int
3cff4d2e
neno:nextInst
urn:uuid:
lanl:Push rdf:type neno:hasValue "2"^^xsd:int
403d632c
neno:nextInst
urn:uuid:
lanl:Push rdf:type neno:hasValue "3"^^xsd:int
47fe91e2
neno:nextInst
urn:uuid:
lanl:Multiply rdf:type
7c08528e
neno:nextInst
urn:uuid:
lanl:Add rdf:type "x"^^xsd:string
7c08528e
neno:nextInst
urn:uuid:
lanl:Set rdf:type neno:hasSymbol
361604bc
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009
34. Conclusion
• Thank you for your time...
My homepage: http://markorodriguez.com
Neno/Fhat: http://neno.lanl.gov
New Mexico Internet Professionals Association Lecture (NMIPA) – Santa Fe, New Mexico – February 12, 2009