Introduction to Semantic Web

One of the aims of the SAWS project is to record and visualise the links within and between gnomologia; between these collections and source texts; and between collections and their recipient texts.

We represent and record these links using RDF, in the form of 'triples' of information that link a subject to an object through a predicate. RDF triples represent our information in a computer-readable way, on the Semantic Web.

To provide the vocabulary we wish to use to express the links in the gnomologia, we have designed an ontology. The SAWS ontology contains:

  • Items of interest in the gnomologia (anything we might want to link to/from)
  • Relations between those Items (any link we might want to express)

Further details of the SAWS ontology can be found here

The SAWS ontology itself is declared as an OWL ontology at http://purl.org/saws/ontology.