Why Designing Accessible Web Sites Makes More Sense than Ever

Start Time: 10.00 - 12.00

Since its inception, the World Wide Web has changed the way we communicate, the way we do business, the way we seek information and entertainment – the very way most of us live our daily lives. Today, the W3C is looking towards the next evolution in Web technologies: the Semantic Web. In the Semantic Web data itself becomes part of the Web and is able to be processed independently of application, platform, or domain. Where the current Web is a collection of documents, the Semantic Web is more like a huge database, in which data on Web pages as well as in databases and legacy systems can be searched, processed, and acted on by machines in meaningful ways. The Semantic Web relies on structured sets of metadata and inference rules that allow it to “understand” the relationship between different data resources. The technologies that form the basis of the Semantic Web by adding these metadata and inference rules are RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language). Read on below for more information about SemanticWorks™ 2006, the new, visual Semantic Web development tool from Altova. If you’d like to learn more about the Semantic Web, please visit the “What is the Semantic Web?” page. Create Semantic Web Documents Visually Altova SemanticWorks™ 2006 allows you to graphically create and edit RDF instance documents, RDFS vocabularies, and OWL ontologies with full syntax checking. Context-sensitive entry helpers present you with a list of permitted choices based on the RDF or OWL dialect you’re using, so you can create valid documents quickly and easily. SemanticWorks™ 2006 provides powerful, easy-to-use functionality for: Visual creation and editing of RDF, RDF Schema (RDFS), OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full documents using an intuitive, visual interface and drag-and-drop functionality Syntax checking to ensure conformance with the RDF/XML specifications Auto-generation and editing of RDF/XML or N-triples formats based on visual RDF/OWL design Printing the graphical RDF and OWL representations to create documentation for Semantic Web implementations You can switch from the graphical RDF/OWL view to the text view to see how your document is being built in RDF/XML or N-triples format, and you can export your file from RDF/XML to N-triples or vice versa at any time. And, because the RDF/XML or N-triples code is auto-generated based on your design, you can learn and experiment with the concepts of the Semantic Web without having to write complicated code.