You Learned About Semantic Web Fundamentals in Fifth Grade
You learned much of what you need to know about semantic web fundamentals in fifth grade. Remember the class that covered grammar; specifically subjects, objects, and predicates? A sentence conveys a complete thought. Every complete thought has a subject, an object, and a predicate which connects a verb with the object. Subjects and objects are both nouns.
First, we are less interested in all sentences, we are mainly interested in one category of the sentence called the "statement". (We are not interested in sentences that are "questions" like, "What is your name?" and we are not interested in sentences called "commands" like "Stop!".
Are focus will be the statement. A statement asserts or declares something and is known to be true by definition. Another name for a statement is "fact". A statement of fact. Because a statement is a type of sentence; and every sentence has a subject, object, and predicate; then it is logical that every statement also has a subject, object, and predicate.
Are focus will be the statement. A statement asserts or declares something and is known to be true by definition. Another name for a statement is "fact". A statement of fact. Because a statement is a type of sentence; and every sentence has a subject, object, and predicate; then it is logical that every statement also has a subject, object, and predicate.
The subject of a statement is the thing that performs some sort of action which is described by the verb or is being described in the statement of fact. A subject is always a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase that indicates what the statement is about. The person, place, or thing that the statement is about. For example,
"Microsoft acquired LinkedIn." (The subject is "Microsoft.")
"The Security and Exchange Commission is a regulator." (The subject is "The Securities and Exchange Commission.")
"They are solvent." (The subject is "They." While you don't know exactly who "they" actually is, whoever "they" are is the subject. You need more information to understand exactly who "they" refers to.)
The object of a statement is a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase; but the object is special in that the object receives or is affected by the action. Statements always have objects and an object can be direct or indirect. Direct objects directly receive the action of the verb. Indirect objects are affected by the action of the verb indirectly. For example,
"Microsoft acquired LinkedIn." (The object is "LinkedIn" which is a direct object.)
"Microsoft gave a donation to the democratic party." (The object is "the democratic party" which is an indirect object.)
The predicate of a statement is a verb and provides information about the subject. The predicate usually consists of the verb along with any other words that modify or complete the action or state expressed by the verb. In essence, the predicate tells explains something about the subject or what the subject is doing. For example,
"Microsoft acquired LinkedIn." (The predicate is "acquired.")
"Microsoft gave a donation to the democratic party." (The predicate is "gave a donation".)
"The Security and Exchange Commission is a regulator." (The predicate is "is a.")
The set of all the statement forms a system. or a "world" or "universe of discourse" or "area of knowledge". The set of statements provides knowledge (i.e. information in the form of facts in the form of statements), using the rules of logic to form a theory, which describes and explains the nature and structure of the system.
Both humans and machines can understand logic. Humans tend to have an innate understanding of logic (i.e. those statements). Machines such as computers, which actually work per the rules of mathematics which is based on the elementary rules of logic, can also understand logic.
Effectively, these statements of a "subject", a "predicate", and an "object" are commonly referred to as "triple statements" or "triples". These subjects, predicates, and objects describe "something in the world" or "something in the system" or "something in the universe of discourse" or "something in the area of knowledge". Another word used to describe these "somethings" is simply a "thing". Those "things" are also called "resources" or "resource statements". And so, the statements provide information about resources. Knowledge is made up of information in the form of these factual statements. Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. Skills are patterns of action and behavior.
Subject matter experts (SMEs) for an area of knowledge are the ones able to perform the actions and behaviors. But you can make a machine intelligent by putting this information that represents knowledge and skills into machine readable form. That means that the machine can also perform actions or have behaviors.
These sets of statements of subjects, predicates, and objects are (a) very flexible because this is done at a very low level, an "atomic" level; (b) very hard for a human to make use of because it is so low level, like working with computer assembly language (this can be thought of as information assembly language), (c) very easy for machines like computers to make use of, and (d) very easy for software engineers to work with because it is so flexible.
To make these atomic level resources more useful to humans, those atomic level artifacts are used to construct molecular level artifacts, and the molecular level artifacts are used to create "organisms" that are easier for subject matter experts to relate to. This technique is called the Atomic Design Methodology.
When defining "things" it is important to understand who defined the thing, differentiate things defined by different parties but used the same name, and other such details. Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRI) help with that.
These statements can be organized in different ways. The spectrum includes: name authority, thesaurus, taxonomy, ontology, and theory. Each provides a different level of expressive power to represent statements which define and explain things.
And so you have the Zen of information assembly.
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