| In May 2001, Tim Berners-Lee published a paper titled with "The Semantic Web" in Scientific American in which he expounded the blueprint of Semantic Web systematically. In his opinion, "The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." Therefore, compared with the existing World Wide Web, the greatest advantage of Semantic Web is "machine understandability". The extension of the existing Web empowered it with the abilities of reasoning and automatic processing.In the decade after the emerging of Semantic Web, many technologies and standards were set and a variety of Semantic Web tools emerged, which played a positive role for the development of Semantic Web Application. A Semantic Web application is any software application that depends on the standards of the Semantic Web for its execution, and which provides the end-user with means to interact with the application.Firstly, results of a survey of the home and aboard literature research on SWA and its framework shows that the research could be divided into two categories. The first category is "theoretical research". It builds SWA framework through case study and takes reference of framework and method of Web application. This kind of SWA framework aims at specific applications, such as Semantic portal, Semantic Web Service, Semantic Search Engine. But it is too targeted to be commonly used. The other category is "empirical research". It conducts a survey of existing SWA and extracts the generality and general functional components, then build a SWA framework base on logical relationship. Obviously, it is highly optimized for general use. Currently, there is no such empirical research in China and the paper hopes to bridge the research gap. Though this framework, the paper aims to provide a reference for the SWA developers and reduce their difficulties of Software development.Secondly, reviewed the 84 applications submitted to the SWC(The Semantic Web Challenge) from 2008-2013 in seven aspects:(1) Application type; (2) Application domain; (3) Application terminal; (4) Support for Semantic Web standards:Which official World Wide Web consortium Semantic Web standards does the application support?(5) Data access capabilities:Does the application make use of decentralized, heterogeneous data; (6) Integration and alignment:How is data integration and schema alignment implemented? (7) Authoring support:Does the application allow the end-user to author content?The survey shows that:(1) There are nine main application types:Semantic Search Engines, Tools, Semantic Social Web, and Semantic Recommendation System, Mash-up, Semantic Expert System, Semantic Portal, LOD Browse and Semantic Web Service.(2) The main application areas include Biomedical and Life Sciences, Geospatial Information, Research, UGC, Government Information, Multimedia, Archive and Daily Life area.(3) With the advancement of smart phone, APPs have been increasingly necessary, so the SWA is starting to attach importance to the development of mobile terminals. The requirement for user interface is increasing, and pays more attention to user experience.(4) In terms of Semantic Web standards, almost all the applications use RDF, more than half use OWL and SPAQRL.(5) Most of these applications meet the requirements of decentralized and heterogeneous data.(6) Due to the large amount of various data models, it is necessary to integrate the data in a unified mode. The majority of integrations are automatic and the rest are semi-automatic integration. Half of the applications support reasoning.(7) With the development of Web2.0, what users need is not only getting information passively, but also creating information actively. Therefore,26% of the application allows users to edit the content through which they can modify and add new data.Based on the survey data, the 6 most frequently used functional components are Semantic Search, Data Adapters, Data Integration, Triple Store, User Interface and Data Conversion. The utilization ratio of these 6 components is more than 94%, besides, the utilization ratio of Semantic Annotation and Reasoning is more than 48%, giving very strong support for putting them into the framework. Additionally, the Crawler and Annotation User Interface accounts for more than 26% of the 84 applications, so it varies when considering whether to use them or not based on the specific circumstances.Thirdly, a generally used SWA framework is built in accordance with the logical relationship of data flow (data accessing, processing, storing and utilizing) based on the commonly used functional component mentioned above.Finally, a Linked Data-oriented Framework in Digital Libraries is set based on the SWA framework to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the framework. |
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