On Boosting Semantic Web Data Access

Abstract

The Semantic Web can be viewed as a collection of RDF graphs serialized by RDF documents that distributed in the Web. Its utility depends on three issues: availability (existence of data), accessibility (users can retrieve the data they want), and quality (users can judge the quality of the retrieved data). While more data are available in the Semantic Web, the latter two issues are often ignored or circumscribed due to lacking of tools and mechanisms. This dissertation proposes an ontology-based approach to these two issues so as to boost the utility of the Semantic Web. For accessibility, we identified three critical challenges: i) there are few links to (and almost no description about) RDF documents; ii) it is hard to query the Semantic Web since users are not familiar with semantic web vocabulary (i.e. the URIrefs) with over 150,000 unique entries; and iii) it is unrealistic to query the entire Semantic Web without effective data access service. In order to address these challenges, we proposed the Web of Belief (WOB) ontology to model the Semantic Web and its context (i.e. the web and the agent world), and developed Swoogle system that digests and searches