E-commerce: Lab Assignment # 4

Submitted by: Reeja Baig

Reg.No: SP19-BBA-247

Submitted to: Sir Zeeshan Baber

Date of submission: 18th October 2021

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Question:
Please search on the internet about semantic web. What is it and how it is impacting E-
commerce?

Answer:
Definition of Semantic Web:

The Semantic Web is an extension the Semantic Web is an extension of the web through
standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standards promote common data
formats and exchange protocols on the Web, most fundamentally the Resource Description
Framework (RDF).

According to the W3C, ‘The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data
to be shared and reused across application, enterprise and community boundaries.’’ the
term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee for a web of data that can be processed by machines.
While its critics have questioned its feasibility, proponents argue that applications in
industry, biology, and human sciences research have already proven the validity of the
original concept.

The 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee Handler and La Silla described an
expected evolution of the existing web to a Semantic Web. In 2006 Berners-Lee and
colleagues stated that: ‘This simple idea remains largely unrealized.’’ In 2013, more than four
million web domains contained Semantic Web markup.

Summary of the Research paper:

Title: Semantic Web Services: A Communication Infrastructure for eWork and eCommerce

The computer was created as a computing device. It is now also a cyberspace portal,
providing access to a global network of data exchange and economic activities. This
transformation has been facilitated by the Internet and its most widely used application, the
World Wide Web. In terms of both the amount of information available and the number of
people utilizing it, the World Wide Web, in particular, is a remarkable success tale. It has
rapidly reached critical mass and is now infiltrating most aspects of our everyday lives as
citizens and workers. Its success is largely due to the simplicity of its underlying structures
and protocols, which enable access to a wide range of resources. However, the Web's future
development may be constrained by its simplicity. Indeed, as will be shown further below,
present web technology has significant flaws. While it is capable of uploading and
generating a wide range of content, it is only capable of processing online content to a

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limited extent. As a result, the human user bears the brunt of the burden of locating,
accessing, extracting, interpreting, and processing data.

Tim Berners-Lee envisioned a Semantic Web that allows automated information access and
use based on data semantics that can be machine-processed. He described possible future
possibilities for the evolution of the World Wide Web in his informal 'Semantic Web Road
Map.' These concepts, which are based in part on prior content and resource description
operations, have stimulated the interest of researchers and developers from around world,
both in academia and industry. They promote the integration of initiatives that have been
happening in numerous R&D communities for a long time, involving experts from diverse
computer science areas. These initiatives are aimed at capturing the semantics of digital
content of all types and origins, as well as creating techniques to act meaningfully on the
resulting formal knowledge representations.

A distinctive level of service will be enabled by the explicit encoding of data semantics based
on domain theories (i.e., Ontologies). It will connect a vast network of human knowledge,
augment it with machine processability, and enable automated services to assist individuals
(from all walks of life) in completing activities that require the efficient use of information
and knowledge. Access to these services could become as important as having access to
electricity.

Ontologies are the foundation of the Semantic Web and, more broadly, the management of
structured knowledge in the technical context of distributed systems. They give machine-
processable semantics for data and information sources that can be shared among agents
(software and people). There have been numerous meanings of "ontology" in the past.
Gruber (1993) presented one that, in our judgement, best encapsulates its essence: A
formal, clear specification of a shared conceptualization is an ontology.

A conceptualization is an abstract representation of a real-world occurrence that identifies

the concepts that apply to that phenomenon. The types of concepts employed, as well as
the limits on their use, are fully described. The term "formal" refers to the need that the
Ontology be machine-readable. There are several levels of formality to choose from.
WordNet, for example, is a large ontology that has a thesaurus of over 100,000 natural
language terms that are explained in natural language. CYC, on the other hand, offers formal
axiomatic explanations for many kinds of common-sense knowledge. The term "shared"
refers to the idea that an Ontology might encapsulate consensus knowledge: consensus is
frequently formed through cooperation and communication among people who have the
same or similar interests. People who accept an Ontology are said to have committed
themselves to it. The role of ontologies in the knowledge engineering process is to make the
process of building a domain model easier. An ontology contains the necessary vocabulary

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of terms as well as the relationships between them. The Semantic Web's ontologies and
other technologies provide access to unstructured, heterogeneous, and distributed
information and knowledge sources. They are now just as important as programming
languages were in the 1960s and 1970s.

The field of semantic web technologies is still in its infancy. We're concentrating on
developing its core infrastructure, which is mainly static. The next phase will be to create
active components that will leverage this infrastructure to provide intelligent services to
human consumers. Web services are designed to aid information access and e-commerce.
UDDI, a repository for describing vendors, products, and services, is one example. It uses
WSDL to describe its entries and SOAP as the protocol for accessing them. None of these
service description elements use semantic web technology at the moment. As a result,
processes like looking for vendors, products, and services, comparing and combing
products, and creating vendor coalitions, among others, necessitate a great deal of human
labor. By automating several of these characteristics, semantic web-enabled web services
can deliver a greater degree of service. Projects such as DAML and Ibrow are taking steps in
this direction. A service description language called DAML-S has been developed within
DAML. This language provides for formal competency descriptions, which can then be used
to choose and combine services via automatic inference. Ibrow created UPML, a language
for describing both static and dynamic components of a semantic web. Ontologies, heuristic
reasoners (also known as problem-solving methods), and strategies for combining them are
all described in UPML. An automated broker provides component selection, combination,
and execution assistance based on these descriptions.

Individual message exchanges are specified via WSDL as web services. They can be one-way
messages between a sender and a receiver that are synchronous or asynchronous, or a pair
of messages that follow a request/reply pattern between a sender and a receiver. While
these two patterns are sufficient in many cases, they are insufficient for more complex
message exchange patterns (referred to as public processes) such as a purchase order (PO)
and purchase order acknowledgment (POA) exchange, in which the PO and POA messages
are acknowledged separately by low-level message acknowledgements confirming message
receipt. These public processes are not defined by WSDL. Trading partners that try to match
their sophisticated public procedures in order to conduct business with each other may find
that their public processes are incompatible. One trading partner, for example, wants
message acknowledgments, but the other does not deliver them. The compensation of
these public process mismatches is not supported by any of the languages mentioned
above. No third-party mediator can be asked to compensate for process mismatches in a
peer-to-peer context. Trading partners must compensate themselves in their respective
contexts. To realize the vision of mechanized support for public process integration, proper

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concepts and an approach for automatic and semantics-preserving public process
integration semantic web technologies must be used to web services. All of these service
descriptions are now written in a semi-formal natural language style. As a result, the human
programmer must be kept informed, and web service scalability and efficiency are
constrained. They must be combined with semantic web technology to reach their full
potential. It will automate the process of identifying, configuring, contrasting, and
combining services. Web Services offered by the Semantic Web have the potential to impact
our lives far more than the current web has.

Without convincing applications, no technology can survive. As a result, three broad

application areas have been outlined. However, the reader should be aware of the length of
time that innovation takes. For instance, the World Wide Web, the most well-known Internet
application, took 30 years to mature. Perhaps the types of applications we'll explore will
lead to important breakthroughs much more quickly.

Knowledge Management: Companies' competitiveness in rapidly changing marketplaces is

primarily determined by how they leverage and keep their expertise (corporate memory).
The majority of material in modern electronic media, whether on the Internet or on
corporate intranets, is poorly organized. It's challenging to find and keep useful information.
Nonetheless, an increasing number of businesses are realizing that their intranets may be
valuable corporate information stores. Raw data, on the other hand, does not solve business
problems on its own; it is useless without an understanding of how to use it effectively. It
has become a huge challenge to convert it into usable information. Leveraging an
organization's data and information sources for innovation, increased productivity, and
competitive power is what corporate knowledge management is all about. Many firms are
becoming increasingly geographically distributed and organized around virtual teams as a
result of globalization and the impact of the Internet. Knowledge management and
organizational memory technologies that enable users to better comprehend one other's
evolving contextual knowledge and facilitate collaboration while recording, representing,
and interpreting knowledge resources are required in such organizations. In reality, the
scope of knowledge management extends far beyond the requirements of commercial
enterprises. Scientists, scholars, educators, and other professionals in particular, as well as
their unique knowledge resources, are concerned about this (of all kinds of media).
However, the fundamental issues that these communities of practice confront when it
comes to generating and utilizing their resources are quite similar to those that "knowledge
workers" in large and small businesses face.

Knowledge management systems are designed to deal with operations of relevance to the
"knowledge lifecycle" within a given organization or community of practice. But they still

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have severe limitations, e.g.: Existing keyword-based search retrieves irrelevant information
due to term ambiguity, and misses information when material related to similar concepts is
stored under quite different terms. Software agents can play an important role in the
creation and maintenance of large repositories of weakly structured text. Maintaining large
repositories is a difficult and time-consuming activity. Adaptation and dynamic
reconfiguration of information repositories (e.g., web sites) hinges on auto-document
generation and is not yet fully mastered.

Semantic Web Service technologies and especially the use of Ontologies, are expected to
enable a much higher degree of automation and scalability. In order to keep weakly
structured collections consistent, or to generate information presentations from semi-
structured data, the semantics of these collections and data must not only be machine-
accessible but also machine-processable.

Enterprise Application Integration: Integration of data, information, processes, and

applications within businesses is becoming more important. Mergers and acquisitions
often require large-scale integration of existing IT infrastructures. New software solutions
often have to integrate existing legacy software. Companies are forced to adapt to ever
changing IT standards.

Recent studies estimate that a significant share of future IT budgets will be spent on
Enterprise Application Integration tasks. This may seriously hamper progress in IT if most of
a company's resources are spent on integrating existing solutions little is left to develop new
approaches. A successful integration strategy must combine the advantages of adhoc and
global integration. It must be driven by business needs but also address the all-important
issues of extendibility and reusability.

Internet-based eCommerce allows for more openness, flexibility and dynamics. Instead of
implementing one link per supplier, a supplier can be linked to a marketplace with a large
number of potential customers. Virtual enterprises can form in reaction to demands from
the market and large enterprises can break up into smaller units, mediating their eWork
relationship based on eCommerce relationships. Semantic Web technologies are the most
likely candidates to provide viable eCommerce solutions. They span networks of meaning
where heterogeneous products, services, and modes are subject to frequent change. While
Ontologies are required in order to exchange meaning the very exchange of meaning may
impact on an Ontology.