Get Started with the Semantic Web

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Welcome to 'Get Started with the Semantic Web'. The authors of this page are often asked to explain the basics of RDF and the Semantic Web. We intend to have a comprehensive, beginners-friendly list of tutorials and sources of help and advice.

Contents

[edit] Things we presume you already know about

  • a basic knowledge of how the Web works - in the sense of basic awareness of HTTP and HTML
  • Uniform Resource Indicators (URIs) - the category of identifying strings for resources on the Internet. See Wikipedia for more information
  • that you know of Unicode
  • that you have at least a very basic knowledge of XML

[edit] RDF

RDF is a framework for representing data that uses a 'triple' structure. Often people confuse RDF with it's XML syntax. This is bad for a couple of reasons - it can lead to confusion about what RDF actually is at a theoretical level, and it can lead to poor design decisions when either creating RDF or parsing it. It is a good idea to start learning RDF in a non-XML syntax. One of these is called Notation3 (N3 for short).

Tim Berners-Lee has written an excellent tutorial on RDF using Notation3. It's worth reading a couple of times.

Other tutorials worth reading on RDF:

[edit] RDF Tools

Tools for using RDF exist in a variety of languages. See Semantic Web Tools for a listing of many of these.

It is worth starting with installing Cwm, a command line tool written in Python that is designed to help you do conversion between RDF formats (as well as some advanced functions). There is a comprehensive tutorial, which the above linked Notation3 tutorial is taken from.

[edit] Using RDF with HTML

There are a variety of ways of using RDF data within HTML and (other) XML data. It is worth considering each of them for their merits, and using them with care. These include:

[edit] SPARQL

SPARQL is a SQL-like query language used in Semantic Web tools to make querying data in RDF easier. It is a W3C Recommendation. Documents worth reading about SPARQL include:

[edit] RDFS and OWL

Please help expand this section

[edit] Getting support

The W3C has numerous resources to help you with learning about and developing the Semantic Web.

There is plenty more material - read the specifications if you don't understand something, and try Google.

If you need further support, it's worth using IRC. There are a number of Semantic Web channels on the Freenode network on IRC - irc.freenode.net:6667 - including:

  • #swig - the Semantic Web Interest Group
  • #GetSemantic - the IRC channel for this website
  • #foaf - the FOAF project
  • #sioc - the Semantically Interlinked Online Communities project
  • #jena - the Java RDF framework

Do come and ask in #swig if you need help or advice on anything discussed above.

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