Living Semantic Web

Does the Semantic Web behave like a living system?

Living Semantic Web > Semantic Web graph

 

The first step towards analysing the Semantic Web as a Complex System is to build an appropriate graph model. Due to self-similarity of complex systems, we have selected a significant portion of the Semantic Web to perform the study. It comprises the ontologies available from the DAML Ontology Library.

A modification of the RDFCrawler using the Jena RDF parser (NewRDFCrawler) was launched over all the DAML Library ontology URIs and all the others that were referenced from them, for instance RDF Schema or DAML+OIL. Some of them were unavailable and others not processable by Jena. The 196 processed URIs were combined in a RDF graph and serialised in N-Triples form. The RDF graph was the result of combining 160,000 triples and the starting point of the study:

The same has been applied to a smaller portion of the Semantic Web, starting from an individual ontology, CopyrightOnto, and the ontologies referenced from it. CopyrightOnto is an copyright ontology we have developed. This parallel analysis will allow comparing different scales results. The graph for CopyrightOnto is much smaller, only 971 nodes, and it is shown in Fig. 1.

Graphical representation of IPROnto and associated ontologies

Fig. 1. Graph model for CopyrightOnto ontology and the schemas referenced from it, directly or indirectly. Red nodes correspond to IPROnto concepts, blue ones come from different Dublin Core schemas and, on the center, a combination of resources from RDF/S (white/yellow) and OWL (light green). Finally, literals and anonymous resources are the orange nodes