EXAMPLE OF INSTANCE MARKUP LANGUAGE
IML

by John Flynn
jflynn@bbn.com

This HTML web page is an example of how specific data could be identified on standard web pages and marked up as instances of classes or properties of a remotely located Semantic Web ontology. IML does not address the issue of embedding RDF or OWL within HTML web pages. IML only addresses the simple markup of ontology instance data embedded in HTML markup and the linking of that instance data to the appropriate ontology that is located somewhere else on the Semantic Web.  The instance markup code does not show in the normal web browser view as evidenced below; however, the IML markup on this example page can be seen by selecting View Source in your web browser. The examples of instance markup below are shown in red only as a convention to indicate to the viewer that these terms are instances of a class or property in some ontology. In source view you will also see the tag <instance URI /instance> in the HTML header. This tag could be used to alert spiders searching for instance data that this web page contains instance markup. The actual instance markup takes the form of <iN URI of Ontology:class/property-name /iN>, where N is the number of words in the class/property instance name. Of course, this jury-rigged tagging scheme is not the ultimate way such tags should be created. However, it is the only way I could figure out how to do the necessary markup without the tags themselves showing in the browser view. An addition of an IML specific tag to HTML or XHTML would be the correct approach.

A simple example of how instance markup might be collected by spiders and organized for search purposes or for access by software agents is shown here. The real power of this approach would come when instance data from thousands of HTML web pages were associated with Semantic Web ontologies.

The first example is the instance markup of some HTML information related to the Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF) ontology, located at (1) and the Relationship extension of FOAF located at (2).  If you select view source in your web browser you will see the actual instance markup for the terms show in red.

Example One: My name is John Flynn and I work for BBN Technologies. One of my close friends and co-workers is Mike Dean who is one of the Semantic Web pioneers and the developer of a semantic data triple-store called DAML-DB.

(1) http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/index.rdf

(2) http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/rel-vocab-20040308.rdf

The second example links instance markup with the Wine Ontology that is used as a tutorial in the OWL Web Ontology Language Guide (3). The actual Wine Ontology is located at (4). Again, if you select View Source in your web browser you will see the actual instance markup for the terms in red.

Example Two: Jason Pahlmeyer created a California Bordeaux wine called the Pahlmeyer Red Table Wine from the Napa Wine Company winery in Napa Valley Region, California.