Semantic Web Basics

The Semantic Web has as its basis a very simple atom-like structure. At its most rudimentary it consists of things that have relationships with other things.

This makes more sense when we add content to it.

This triple represents the statement "Bob is the owner of car123." The positions in a triple are called "subject," "predicate," and "object." You probably recognize that this is the basic structure of a sentence (note that "predicate" can also be called a "verb").

As we have seen in previous units, triples can be combined in large and complex webs of data.

There are rules to follow for the creation of valid and usable triples. The key rule is that the subject and the predicate MUST be URIs; only the object can be simple text or a structured data type like a date or an integer. The use of URIs is what makes possible the "link" in "linked data." We will cover this in more detail in the section on URIs.