The semantic webscape: A view of the semantic web

Abstract

It has been a few years since the semantic Web was initiated by W3C, but its status has not been quantitatively measured. It is crucial to understand the status at this early stage, for researchers, developers and administrators to gain insight into what will come in this field. The objective of our work is to quantitatively measure and present the status of the semantic Web. We conduct a longitudinal study on the semantic Web pages to track trends in the use of semantic markup languages. This paper presents early results of this study with two historical data sets from October 2003 and October 2004. Our results show that while it is very early stage of semantic Web adoption, its growth outpaces that of the entire Web for the period. Also, RDF (Resource Description Framework) has dominated among semantic markup languages, taking about 98% of all semantic pages on the Web. It has been used in a variety of metadata annotation applications. This study shows that the most popular application is RSS (RDF Site Summary) for syndicating news and blogs, which takes more than 60% of all semantic Web pages. It also shows that the use of OWL (Web Ontology Language) which was recommended by W3C in early 2004 has been increased 900% for the period.