Searching on the Open Semantic Web Using a URI Identity Management Approach.Mini Thesis:PhD upgrade report

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Description/Abstract

The Semantic Web has a vision that involves the production and use of large amounts of RDF data. There have been recent initiatives amongst the Semantic Web community, in particular the Linking Open Data activity and the ReSIST project, to publish large amounts of RDF that are both interlinked and dereferenceable. The proliferation of such data gives rise to millions of URIs for non-information resources such as people, places and abstract things. Frequently, different data providers will mint different URIs for the same resource, leading to the problem of coreference. This thesis describes the phenomenon of coreference, where it occurs in other disciplines and how it is relevant to the Semantic Web. A ‘Consistent Reference Service’ is proposed for URI identity management and a description of how this is being used in the infrastructure of a scalable Semantic Web system is demonstrated. One of the features that made the Web so easy to use is the ability to search web pages in a matter of seconds through the use of search engines. The URI management system described in this thesis is being integrated into the open Semantic Web. The CRS and RDF data available on the Web means that the possibility appears to improve the quality of searching by linking the Semantic Web with the ‘ordinary’ Web. This thesis outlines an architecture for using the Semantic Web to assist and improve searching on the document Web.