Realizing the Relationship Web: Morphing information access on the Web from today’s document- and entity-centric paradigm to a relationship-centric paradigm

Amit Sheth, Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University

Keywords as input to search engines, with documents as responses, have been the prevalent mode of access to information on the Web. Although there has been recent shift toward entity- aware information access methods, these methods remain devoid of semantics. Semantics is increasingly being recognized as the lynchpin for integrating resources (data and services) on the Web.  We posit the idea that relationships are at the heart of semantics.  To take information access over the Web from a mere document retrieval operation to an operation that provides insight via Semantic Analytics over Web resources, we propose the Relationship Web. We envision a web of resources where all varieties of relationships (including implicit and explicit, formal and informal)—links with associated meaningful descriptions and properties—play a central role in greatly improving our ability to exploit and provide insight into the huge amount of multimodal data we are gathering on almost any topic or object. 

And that is to be expected.  Semantics can play critical role in improving all three core functions of any information system, including the Web—search, integration, and analysis.  While a lot can be done to achieve good search without involving semantics, little can be done to integrate data and information from multiple sources without addressing semantic heterogeneity.  Addressing syntactic and structural differences is simply not enough.  The real power of the Web of resources to furnish new insights and new knowledge will be evident when we focus on relationships between these resources and their constituent data.

Relationship Web, as we define it, is a reincarnation of the vision of “memex” in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article “As We May Think,” adapted and extended to exploit the World Wide Web with its huge variety of resources.  Emerging Semantic Web standards such as RDF that treat relationships as first-class objects provide early capability to realize very modest forms of Relationship Web.  Looking forward, we anticipate the evolution of a new relationship-centric computing infrastructure that recognizes a bewildering variety of relationships we need to model, describe, and compute with, including relationships that support

In our earlier work [1], we discussed the opportunities and challenges related to supporting complex relationships for heterogeneous (unstructured, semi-structured, structured) data.  In this talk, we will discuss additional examples that demonstrate the power of a relationship-centric view of managing and exploiting scientific, multimedia, and multimodal content (image, audio, video, streaming data, sensor data, etc.).

[1] A. Sheth, B. Arpinar, and V. Kashyap, Relationships at the Heart of Semantic Web: Modeling, Discovering, and Exploiting Complex Semantic Relationships, in Enhancing the Power of the Internet, Eds. Nikravesh et al., Springer 2004, pp. 63-94. Also, associated keynote at SOFSEM, 2002 and a research review on Relationships.

Amit Sheth is an educator, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar for Advanced Data Management and Analysis at Wright State University, where directs the Kno.e.sis center for Knowledge enabled Information & Services Science.  Earlier, he was a professor at the University of Georgia, where he founded and directed the LSDIS lab, widely recognized as a leading international research group in the areas of semantic Web, SOA and workflows. Before that, he served in R&D groups at Bellcore, Unisys, and Honeywell. His research has led to several commercial products and two companies in the areas of Workflow Management and Semantic Web, which he founded and managed in various executive roles. Professor Sheth is an IEEE Fellow and has received recognitions such as the IBM Faculty award. He has published over 250 papers and articles, given over 190 invited talks and colloquia including 28 keynotes, (co)-organized/chaired 28 conferences/workshops, and served on around 120 program committees. He is on several journal editorial boards and is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS).