Understanding Semantic Web and Ontologies: Theory and Applications

Semantic Web is actually an extension of the current one in that it represents information more meaningfully for humans and computers alike. It enables the description of contents and services in machine-readable form, and enables annotating, discovering, publishing, advertising and composing services to be automated. It was developed based on Ontology, which is considered as the backbone of the Semantic Web. In other words, the current Web is transformed from being machine-readable to machine-understandable. In fact, Ontology is a key technique with which to annotate semantics and provide a common, comprehensible foundation for resources on the Semantic Web. Moreover, Ontology can provide a common vocabulary, a grammar for publishing data, and can supply a semantic description of data which can be used to preserve the Ontologies and keep them ready for inference. This paper provides basic concepts of web services and the Semantic Web, defines the structure and the main applications of ontology, and provides many relevant terms are explained in order to provide a basic understanding of ontologies.