Semantic Web and Services

Research Aim

The vision of the semantic web is to connect data in order to provide a richer experience for users: enabling links between descriptive text, data sets, visual and audio media, etc., which is tailored to the user needs. The goal is to provide a technology that enables users to find relevant information from within a maze of data, and to allow them to contribute by adding their own knowledge to the available content.

The NeXT computer that served the first website, on show at CERN

The first web server, CERN

Research focus

WSS research group is under the Department of Computer Science, at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus. The main research focus of the WSS group is:

  • The use of semantic metadata and ontologies for Big Data
  • The use of formal and informal semantics
  • The integration and interplay of deductive (semantic) and statistical methods
  • Methods to establish semantic interoperability between data sources
  • Ways of dealing with semantic heterogeneity
  • Scalability of Semantic Web methods and tools, and Semantic approaches
  • Data Extraction and Integration
  • Web and Schema Data Extraction And Integration
  • Search Engines and Meta-search Engines
  • Ontology based Information Extraction
  • Wrapper Generation and Knowledge Engineering

Mission & Vision

The Semantic Web vision about an extension of the existing World Wide Web, which provides software programs with machine-interpretable metadata of the published information and data.

Add further data descriptors to otherwise existing content and data on the Web for smart browsing for intelligent results.

“Most of the web’s content today is designed for humans to read, not for computer programs to manipulate meaningfully. Computers can adeptly parse web pages for layout and routine processing, here a header, there a link to another page but, in general, computers have no reliable way to process the semantic.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee