Research Dimensions of Semantic Web

Dear All, 

This is to inform you that Department of Library and Information Science, Central University of Tamil Nadu has organised a special online lecture series Anveshan: Online Lecture Series in LIS for Research Scholars. The eighth online lecture in the series was organised on 15th July, 2021 (Thursday) at 3:00 PM through Google Meet. Prof. Aditya Tripathi, Department of Library and Information Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi has been invited as resource person and he delivered a lecture on "Research Dimensions of Semantic Web". 

The program commenced with a welcome address given by Dr. Akhandanand Shukla, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Library and Information Science, CUTN Thiruvarur followed by a brief introduction about the resource person.

Presentation started by giving brief account on the historical development of the present day Web environment. Features of early Web browsers such as LYNX were also mentioned. Later he discussed the changes happened to the Google browser and introduced the terms like class, entities, relationships, objects, properties etc. in the cyberspace. Here the discussion was mainly concentrated on the properties of cyberspace. Just like in the real world, cyberspace also contains objects and these are conceptualized into categories based on their properties. He gave the example of searching the word “knife” in Google in different situations. The intention for searching this particular term will be different in different situations, which can be understood by human but not always by machines. This is the main reason for retrieving huge amount of unwanted irrelevant results while searching. Later he described the way in which knowledge or objects are represented in cyberspace. After explaining these foundational ideas, he listed the features of Semantic Web. According to him, Semantic Web is a Web of actionable information. It is an extension of the present Web in which information is given in well-defined structure. Further, the architecture of Semantic Web was discussed in detail. Here each and every component in different levels of hierarchy were enumerated. Terms such as URI, Unicode, XML, RDF, RDF Schema, Ontology etc. were introduced and their properties were described. All these were considered to be areas for extensive research. A brief description on Ontologies and Taxonomies were also given. The main aim of the Ontology research is to study entities and their relationships. Insight on some Ontology languages such as OWL (Web Ontology Language), RIF (Rule Interchange Format), and SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) was also made. At the end of the presentation, the promises of the Semantic Web such as its ability to represent information in a more categorized way, hyperlinking facilities, ability to bring more reliable and trusted information and ability to pipe in the useful data from multiple sources were discussed. Also, interesting areas in which further research can be conducted were demonstrated. A few questions were asked and those were answered very well by the speaker. Dr. K.G. Sudhier gave a brief summary of the entire lecture.

The lecture was coordinated by Dr. V. K. Dhanyasree, Assistant Professor, Department of Library and Information Science, Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur and attended by 26 participants. The lecture session ended with a formal vote of thanks delivered by Dr. V. K. Dhanyasree. Mr. Abhijith B., Junior Research Fellow, worked as rapporteur in the program.

The glimpses of the program is given below:

Department congrats to all who attended the program and taken the benefit to listen Prof. Aditya Tripathi on some technical aspects of Semantic Web.

Thanks.