Abstract
The current trends of technology have made companies invest much to the use of information and communication technologies. Information technologies have enhanced business processes and improved automation processes. Web search is becoming an area of concern in the development of computer technologies. With the increased development of websites, searching through this large collection of websites is becoming tedious. Various technologies have been developed in the past to solve this issue. The previous technologies of search engine optimization and search improvements have only helped individual enterprises. Semantic Web is a technology that is being researched and developed to enhance the search of information by computers. This will improve the way computers understand objects and passages. With this technology, there will be accurate search results. This paper will focus on the development and the benefits that this technology will bring to computer searches. It will look at the current status of computer searches and what will be added this technology with the use of the Semantic Web.
Introduction
Information technology is growing at unprecedented speeds and is changing the way business processes are undertaken. There have been developments in the way information and communication technologies were undertaken. From the invention of mainframe computers in the 1960s to the personal computers and office suite applications to the internet of the 1990s, they have all changed the way business processes are undertaken. Widgets Company needs to prepare its infrastructure for the future of information and communication technologies. This paper will focus on the changes that are expected to be taking place in information and communication technologies.
The future of information technology will be much to the use of data to bring out intelligence. This is the semantic web. Information technology will be focused data and how this data can bring meaningful information to the user. The current technology that is used is Web 2.0 where information is interconnected and there is the use of social networks. In the new technology, there will be the use of data to bring about further information and help in decision making. There will be a paradigm shift from getting data that is static to having data that will help in decision making. The new paradigm shift will be having data that will be used in decision making process. With semantic web, users will have their information entered to online agents. The agents would then search the web looking for the best information and resources that will best fit the description given. The online agent would record all information that the user does and will use this data to make future decisions. The agent will use metadata to get all the information that they will need to know (Hitzler, Krotzsch, & Rudolph, 2011).
The domain in which the technology will work is data management and telecommunication domain. In the recent past, there has been the development of data domain because of the fact that there has been increased use of data. This has led to the creation of data mining techniques that has helped in making decisions for businesses. The data mining is rather a manual process because it is decision makers who will have to go through the data mining systems to get the needed information and make the decisions that are required of them.
How semantic works
The semantic web is built on the idea that web pages should be able to understand the content that is displayed on web pages. This is not the case with the current web pages where computers just guess what is displayed by a website. There is a need to develop a strategy that will enable web pages to understand the content that is displayed in web pages. The idea is to make websites understand the content and the structure. The principle that will make the semantic web is to add metadata to web pages so that they are used to describe the website. Metadata is data about data. This will not make machines be able to use artificial intelligence to gain an understanding of machines but will give them the power to understand the content, exchange information between each other, and interpret information. This is seen to be an extension of the World Wide Web. This is not a replacement per se. It has been argued that many websites are using semantic web at the moment. This is not the case because most of the tools that are used are still under development (Hitzler, Krotzsch, & Rudolph, 2011).
With semantic web, searching an item from the internet would be undertaken by web agent. The computerized agent will get the information you want and get the options that are available on the internet and get the results for the user. What the agent would do to achieve this is to go through descriptions and read the available pictures regarding the item that is being searched. The computerized agent would achieve this by using the metadata that has been stored on that website that gives a better description of the website and the contents of that website. In the semantic web, the metadata are not visible to people when they open a web page but it is clearly visible to a computer. The presence of metadata will enable the computerized agent to get results which are more complicated and more accurate. This will enable the World Wide Web to be like a giant database rather than being a giant book which the case we have in the world today.
The Semantic Web will make use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and Resource Description Framework (RDF). XML is a markup language that is similar to HTML. XML describes the data that is used in a given website. The RDF makes use of XML tags and provides a framework in which resources are described. The RDF framework is developed in such a way that everything that it comes across is a resource. With RDF, the noun (resource) is paired with a given item which has been given on the internet. To achieve this, there is the use of triples which are written in XML tags so that the information is expressed as graphs. The triple consist of the subject, property and object. It has been argued that there is the existence of this on the current websites. This is because RSS syndicates make use of this information (Hitzler, & van Harmelen, 2010).
How it is different from what we have
The semantic web is different from what we have today because of the fact that it is able understand the content of the website. With the use of metadata, computers are able to understand the content of the website. This is not currently a possibility because website is only able to understand the structure of the website. The search of information in the current technology is tedious because of this incapability. With the development of the new technology, web search will be more intelligent (Allemang, & Hendler, 2011).
The web search that we have today is different from what we have had in the past because there is lack of content understanding for computers. Although there is a search that is taking place but the search can be said to be manual. Manual because the computer will search the phrase that they have been given without understand the meaning of that phrase. This has limitations because there is no intelligence that is integrated to the search. With the use of the semantic web, there will be some understanding of the content and the search will more personalized results. The computer will also understand what is being searched on the internet. With the growth of many websites, there will be many points that the computers will have to search. This requires that intelligence be integrated to the search.
The technology will create a shift because web search will be based on agents which have metadata. This is a change of what is happening today where web search makes use of phrases that has been entered to the search engine. In the current developments, there is the use of phrases that have information about the items that is being searched. There will be more accurate results with the use of this technology. This is because the agents will able to understand what the website contains. With the current search, search engines return some strange results because the websites that they return have been optimized to appear on top of the search. The computer is not able to understand the details of webs pages and differentiate the genuine websites from those that are not genuine. The genuine websites are the websites that have the right content that is being looked for. Currently website users will have to manually go through the website so that they are able to differentiate the different results that are being found. There will be a shift because of the fact that computers will be more knowledgeable and will understand information from different websites.
Another reason why the technology will shift is because websites will no longer be understood with their structures only. They will be understood more with their content. This will enable computers have a clear understanding of the content and what the websites talks about.
Another reason why there will be a shift is that web search will be more about the content and use of metadata and no longer about using phrases. The current web search is based on the phrases that are found on the websites. This will no longer be the case as web search will be guided by the metadata that is found on the websites. The web search results will be more accurate.
The fourth reason why there will be a shift is that web development will be defined by more parameters and concepts. The technology that is used for developing websites will change. There will be new parameter that is referred to as the RDF which will bring a new framework on how websites are defined. The current websites are defined by their structure alone. There is no way that the computer will know the semantics and the detail of the websites that have been presented. This will be a shift in this definition.
Lastly, personification of websites will be more real. People will have more personified results than what we already have. The entire process will change because people will enter description that will give more personal tastes. This will bring results that are more ingrained to what the users want. The experience of the entire process will be enhanced with the use of this technology.
References
Allemang, D., & Hendler, J. (2011). Semantic web for the working ontologist: effective modeling in RDFS and OWL. Access Online via Elsevier.
Hitzler, P., & van Harmelen, F. (2010). A reasonable semantic web. Semantic Web, 1(1), 39-44.
Hitzler, P., Krotzsch, M., & Rudolph, S. (2011). Foundations of semantic web technologies. Chapman and Hall/CRC.
