Semantic Web Technologies and Data Management

Overview

The Semantic Web aims to build a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across applications, enterprises, and community boundaries. It proposes to use RDF as a flexible data model and use ontology to represent data semantics. Currently, relational models and XML tree models are widely used to represent structured and semi-structured data. But they offer limited means to capture the semantics of data. An XML Schema defines a syntax-valid XML document and has no formal semantics, and an ER model can capture data semantics well but it is hard for end-users to use them when the ER model is transformed into a physical database model on which user queries are evaluated.