A grammar based approach to introduce the Semantic Web to novice users

Abstract

The Semantic Web is an extension of the Web where information is represented in a machine processable way. Since the idea of the Semantic Web was introduced in the late 1990's, many tools and applications that can be used on the Semantic Web have been developed and many people agree that it is relatively an ordered environment in which information units are hyperlinked according to their semantic relationships. On the other hand, there are still a group of users who do not even know the existence of the Semantic Web. The components of the Semantic Web include RDF (Resource Description Framework) documents, OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies, etc. and since the number of RDF documents has been increasing, it is not unusual that users encounter RDF documents while surfing the Web. In this paper, we propose an approach to introduce the Semantic Web to novice users. To this end, we have built an easy-to-use system that helps users create simple RDF documents and construct a small-scale Semantic Web like environment. Our system can take an input that a user provides and creates an RDF document and all that the user needs to do is define a string for the RDF document according to the grammar that we propose. Users can also define simple rules using the grammar and practice programming using RDF documents. We have experimented the proposed system with non-expert users who did not know the Semantic Web and experimental results indicated that they could have a concrete image about the Semantic Web even without knowing the technical details because they were able to create and modify RDF documents easily and they understood what is meant by representing information in a machine understandable way.