Publishing Technology CEO George Lossius explains why the semantic web is integral to the future of publishing. First presented as part of Tools of Change Frankfurt's Metadata Future's conference, George's presentation is a comprehensive overview of the semantic web for publishers.

1. Navigating the Semantic Web
George Lossius
CEO Publishing Technology

2. Overview Overview
•
•What is linked data or the semantic web?
•Definitions
•Why do we need it?
•Who is using it now?
•Business benefits for the trade

3. What do we do, our qualifications?
Content Audience Content
Systems Development Delivery
Our consultative approach is to tailor our suite of products and
services to create the most robust solution for the management,
promotion and delivery of our clients’ content.
ContentForward

4. What is the Semantic Web and linked
data?

5. Web 2.0
 What is the web?
 Document or information retrieval
 Search engines
 HTML to understand the syntax of the document
 Data is mostly stored as metadata
 You search and you retrieve which is fine if you know
exactly what you are looking for
 Rigid and the information is held in silos

6. Web 3.0
―I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of
analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions
between people and computers. A ‗Semantic Web‘, which should make this
possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms
of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines
talking to machines. The ‗intelligent agents‘ people have touted for ages
will finally materialize.‖
— Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

7. What is the Semantic Web?
The Semantic Web takes the web solution further
 Web of linked data ‗v‘ web of documents
 Framework of emerging standards (W3C)
 Structured content – standard way of describing ―things‖
 Ontology
 Inference / relationships
 Interoperable
 Combination of data from diverse sources

8. Semantic Web Terminology

9. Definitions
 Resource Description Framework (RDF)
 Web Ontology Language (OWL)
 Extensible Markup Language (XML)
 Databases
 Extensible HTML (XHTML)

10. Semantic websites

11. Taxonomy
Religion

14. Buddhism Christian
Theology
Church Catholic
History Studies
Christianity
Biblical
Studies
Anabaptist,
Mennonite
Quaker
Studies
Religion
Judaism
Comparative
Religion
Mystical and
Hinduism Esoteric
Islam

15. Taxonomy Development
For example, the GSE taxonomy contains
Climate change, pollution & environmental impacts
- Water pollution
- Air pollution
After enhancing with Library of Congress classification
Climate change, pollution & environmental impacts
- Water pollution – variants: aquatic pollution, water contamination
Marine pollution – variants: ocean pollution, sea pollution
Oil pollution of water – variants: petroleum pollution of water
Estuarine pollution – variants: estuary pollution
- Air pollution

16. Improved search - Enhancing auto-suggest

17. Using taxonomy information for “did you mean”

18. Guiding the user through facets

19. Guiding the user through suggestions

20. Boosting relevant results / concepts

21. Concept homepages

22. Concept homepages

23. Showing concepts on item homepages
Engineering technology to deliver the revolution 23

24. Suggest related items

25. Who else is using it?

26. Professional Networks
Profile
information
provided as part
of Research
Exchange
Find
researchers
by location
View co-
authors

27. Who else is using it?
Online giants

28. Who else is using it?
 Online giants

29. But why do we need it?
 Time poor users, information rich environment
 Information overload
 Content existing in various sites and silos
 Low tolerance, users want to find information quickly and easily
 Increased reliance on search engines
(but tertiary)

30. In the context of publishing…
 Solid foundation for content storage & delivery
 Income - Flexibility to repackage content, create new products, drive new
features
 User can find relevant information – discoverability
 Semantically enrich content – gives meaning to the searches so the
search engines deliver relevant results
 Improving usage of content
 User centric digital strategy
 Ability to break down content silos & enrich products
 Interoperability
 Providing external context to content

31. george.lossius@publishingtechnology.com
blog.publishingtechnology.com
@publishingtech