2.4. Semantic technologies
GNOSS represents language through semantic technologies.
The Semantic Web, also known as the 'Data Web', enables any Internet user to find answers to his/her questions more quickly and easily thanks to a more defined information, that is, with more meaning. It is based on the idea of adding semantic and and ontological metadata to the World Wide Web. That additional information - which describe the content, the meaning and the relation of the data- must be provided in a formal way, so that they can be evaluated automatically by processing machines.
In GNOSS all its contents are available in RDF format. RDF Files 'understand' the content they carry, as they are defined on the basis of an ontology or system of categories that represent the knowledge embedded in them. In the case of GNOSS, this ontology is described in OWL. Both RDF and OWL are standards for the semantic web accepted by W3C o World Wide Web Consortium, which is the international organization that deals with the stablishment of all the standards on the web. Furthermore GNOSS permits, specifically, the creation of semantically represented contents (OWL + RDF) thanks to its engine for the creation of semantic forms.
OWL
OWL is the acronym for Ontology Web Language, a markup language for publishing and sharing data using ontologies on the web. OWL is thought to be used in aplications that need to process the content of the information instead of representing only information for human beings (as it is the case of the webs working with HTML format). OWL can be used to represent explicitly the meaning of terms in vocabularies and the relations between those terms. This representation of terms and their interrelations is called ontology.
OWL facilitates a markup model built on RDF and codified in XML that provides a higher capacity to express meaning and semantics than other languages like XML, RDF and RDF-S. In this way, OWL goes further than those other languages refering to the capacity of representing content interpreted by a computer on the web.
RDF AND ONTOLOGICAL GRAPH
RDF, acronym for Resource Description Framework, is a base to process metadata on the web. The RDF files provide interoperativity between applications that exchange information legible by a machine on the web.
This model is based on the idea of converting the statements on the resources into expressions with the structure subject-predicate-object (known in RDF terms as triplets). The subject is the resource, that is, what is being described. The predicate is the property or connection to stablish in relation to the resource. Finally, the object is the value of the property or the other resource to stablish the relation with. The combination of RDF with other tools such as RDF Schema and OWL enables to add meaning to the pages and is one of the essential technologies of the semantic Web and in GNOSS in particular.
SEMANTIC URLs
Semantic URLs help users and search engines to remember and visualize easily the content of a web; they are formed by words related to the content of the page and, therefore, easier to remember.
