Planning a Semantic Web site

[Conspiracy]

I've read this very interesting article at IBM discussing the process and the problems that you might undergo to make your website part of the semantic web , before we jump to the article here is some quotes..

 

 

 

"The Semantic Web brings with it the opportunities for users to get smarter search results, and for site owners to get more targeted traffic as users find what they really want. But these benefits don't just magically appear. This article leads you through the aspects of both information architecture and general infrastructure you need in place to truly take advantage of this burgeoning opportunity."

 

before you read you might need to know this Frequently used acronyms

 

* API: application programming interface

* HTML: Hypertext Markup Language

* URI: Uniform Resource Identifier

* W3C: World Wide Web Consortium

* XML: Extensible Markup Language

 

 

 

Things you need to know when planning a Semantic Web site

 

As you've already seen, if you build the next great Web 2.0 site, you can save time if you plan from the start to embrace Semantic Web technologies and turn your Web site into an API, rather than create a separate API for your Web site. A Semantic Web approach gives you free API-like functionality. Usually an API is a way to get structured data, in XML or JSON format, out of an otherwise unstructured Web site. This leads to a dual approach: You have Web pages for human consumption and you have an API where computers can pull out structured information for automatic processing. However, this creates extra work for you; if you expect people to make use of your API, then you have to document it and support it and keep it synchronized with new features on your Web site. With a Semantic Web approach, your Web site is the structured data. You don't need a separate implementation. You and your users can take advantage of other Semantic Web tools to do automatic processing.

 

This does raise some issues for planning. With an API you are free to define your own data format for each item of information you want to deliver, and in the Semantic Web this is analogous to defining your own ontology. Ontology design can be a difficult thing to get right with little experience, so you should consider whether any of the large array of existing ones will be suitable for the types of data you plan to use, which will be discussed in the next section. When you design an API, you also usually consider an object model for conceptual organization so developers can understand when they get collections of items or just items, and which collections their items belong in. On a Semantic Web site this will be partly determined by your ontology choices, but also by your URI scheme. Next, you'll look at approaches to making your URIs usable as part of your API.

 

Finally, on an existing Web site, you and your users can still benefit from the Semantic Web, if you update your content to take advantage of GRDDL, RDFa and Microformats.

 

Read the full article here..