=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-449/paper-15 |storemode=property |title=Practical Semantic Works - a Bridge from the Users' Web to the Semantic Web |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-449/Challenge6.pdf |volume=Vol-449 |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/esws/Luca09 }} ==Practical Semantic Works - a Bridge from the Users' Web to the Semantic Web== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-449/Challenge6.pdf 
    Practical Semantic Works – a Bridge from the
          Users’ Web to the Semantic Web

                                Anca Paula Luca1

              ”Al. I. Cuza” University, Faculty of Computer Science,
                  General Berthelot, 16, Iaşi 700483, ROMANIA


      Abstract. The PSW (Practical Semantic Works) script attends to en-
      able collaboration between users and the semantic web by providing a
      method for users to take advantage of the semantic markup existent on
      the web with a natural language interface, while preserving the original
      semantic meaning upon usage of the retrieved information.


1    Vision
The problem with reaching towards the semantic web is that the semantic
marked up data is not naturally accessible to users, it needs to be (heavily)
preprocessed. Also, users are not used to, nor technically trained, nor willing
sometimes to produce semantically marked up data, such that, without appro-
priate tools, the mixing between the users’ (social) web and the semantic web
is hurtful for one of the sides. The script proposed here attends to demonstrate
how a bridge between the two can be built: a tool to search semantic knowl-
edge bases, accepting queries in natural language and allowing users to reuse the
responses while preserving the original semantic markup in the background.


2    Means
PSW is a script built for the Ubiquity [8] extension for Firefox, to approach the
user in the browsing process. Ubiquity aims to provide a browser command line to
access web services in natural language-like commands, allowing the developers
to create new commands providing means to parse commands and to operate
with the current page.
    To provide responses to user’s queries, semantically marked data from the
Linked Data [4] project is used, accessed through SPARQL [6] and their re-
spective SPARQL endpoints, so that the tool is able to provide answers from
DBpedia [1], DBLP [2] or Linked Movie Database [3].
    Finally, when a retrieved answer is to be inserted in the user edited docu-
ment ((rich) text area), in order to preserve the semantic markup, since the user
produced content is HTML (when not plaintext), we looked towards the mi-
croformats [5] initiative, which allows to add semantic markup to HTML data,
using simple HTML markup conventions to represent specific types of data.
    We modelled the Ubiquity search command as an RDF [7] triple with a
missing component, its object. Such, for a command like find  of
 in , the source will designate the data repository to fetch
answers from (for the moment DBpedia, DBLP Berlin and Linkedmdb), the
subject search term will be used to look for a subject and the property will
determine the predicate. The response will be a user accessible representation of
the object(s) found for that subject and predicate. A flexible mapping mechanism
is used to identify the subject and the property: each data source has a set of
RDF properties to determine where the subject string is searched, and, upon
success, the RDF property to be retrieved is determined from a mapping of the
the user inserted property. Also, if a prior mapping does not exist for property,
it will be searched as is, using a default per-source prefix. For the response, a
predefined mapping between the retrieved property and a microformat is used to
determine how to mark the response. In addition, a fourth parameter is accepted
by the command, in the form find  of  in 
as , which allows the user to specify the way the retrieved answer
should be used (as a person, event, link, etc).


3   Further Thoughts and Conclusions
This prototype script can be extended to provide a mechanism to a allow users to
define data sources and, by using an import mechanism or a discovery protocol,
to make this accessible to non-technical users. Also, the usage of microformats
can be improved by implementing an alignment mechanism between searched
ontologies and microformats ontology, to determine automatically the format to
be used for a retrieved property, as well actual fetch of the full data required by
the particular format.
    The PSW script aims to explore the space of applications which enable users
to read and write the semantic web also (not only the 2.0 content web), in a
transparent manner, without having to adapt to technical environment, and with
no compromise from the data markup point of view: the ”read” semantics are
not lost upon ”writing”. Such a simple and fast approach, based on orchestrating
existing data, tools and open standards, shows that, beyond the simplicity of the
current stage, a full solution can be built in the direction of a bridge between
the users’ web and the data web.


References
 1. DBpedia initiative: http://dbpedia.org/About
 2. DBLP Berlin SPARQL endpoint: http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/
 3. Linked Movie Database: http://www.linkedmdb.org/
 4. Linked Data initiative: http://linkeddata.org/
 5. Microformats initiative: http://microformats.org
 6. SPARQL Specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/
 7. Resource Description Framework: http://www.w3.org/RDF/
 8. Ubiquity Mozilla Labs project: http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/ubiquity/
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