In the 1980s and 1990s, Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web (WWW). Consecutively in 1994, he created the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Later on, Berners Lee also took part in the invention of the famous Semantic Web. WWW provides information that can only be understood by human beings while being meaningless to machines. In contrast, the Semantic web consists of languages that are used to provide information that is machine readable, therefore provides information that the machine understands.
The main purpose of Semantic Web is to supply ‘machine-understandable information’ [1]. The semantic web embraces computer machines rather than users (human beings) only. WWW is used by human beings to manipulate information through searching and retrieving; users easily understand web pages since it uses people’s language. In addition, the semantic web also provides web pages that are easily comprehended by computer machines. Therefore computer machines would also be able to search and retrieve information as human beings do. The fact that the information on the web is also understood by machines implies that machines can do more work for the users. According to Sampson, D. G., Lytras, M. D., Wagner, G., & Diaz, P. (2004), “The Semantic Web is the emerging landscape of new web technologies aiming at web-based information and services that would be understandable and reusable by both humans and machines.” (Sampson et al, 2004, p26).
Reference:
[3] Sampson, D. G., Lytras, M. D., Wagner, G., & Diaz, P. (2004). Ontologies and the Semantic Web for E-learning. Educational Technology & Society, 7 (4), 26-28.
A good concept, and this can be related to e-learning. One of the most important underlying concepts of the semantic Web is the facilitation of the information filtering, and how this is presented to the user, in this case the learner. When the Web, becomes the e-Learning environment, as the learners, extract the information from the Web, then machine intelligence, can be used to present the information which the learner, needs according to his/her levels of ability, profile, requirements and interests. This is where the Semantic Web aims to get in view of the e-learning context.
ReplyDelete