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The goal of this part is to provide a clear understanding about the Semantic Web:
why we need it, and what is the potential value that can be added by the vision of
the Semantic Web.
Chapter 1: From Traditional Web to Semantic Web.
This chapter presents a
careful introduction to the concept of the Semantic Web. We start the discussion by
summarizing the structure of the current Web and the main activities conducted on
it; we then move on to the key question about what is it in the traditional Web that
stops us from doing more on the Web. The answer to this question intuitively
introduces the need for adding semantics to the Web, which leads to the concept of
the Semantic Web. Given the relationship between metadata and the Semantic Web,
a comprehensive introduction to metadata is also included in this chapter.
Chapter 2: Search Engine in Both Traditional and Semantic Web Environments.
The goal of this chapter is to further help you understand the concept of the Semantic
Web, i.e., what it is and why we need it. As everyone is familiar with search engines,
it is helpful to see what will change if search engines are built and used for the Semantic
Web instead of the traditional Web. In this chapter, we first present how a traditional
search engine works, and then we discuss some changes we could make to it to adapt
it for the Semantic Web. Clearly, after reading this chapter, you should be able to gain
more insights into the benefits offered by the Semantic Web vision.

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T
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After establishing a good understanding of the Semantic Web concept, we use four
chapters to present the technical details of the Semantic Web and its core components.
Chapter 3: The Building Block of the Semantic Web: RDF.
This chapter
presents Resource Description Framework (RDF), the building block of the Semantic
Web. The overview of RDF tells you what RDF is and, more importantly, how it