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Over the next few months, you’ll start hearing an awful lot about something called the Semantic Web. Hailed as the next logical step in the evolution of the world wide web, it’s been bubbling away in research labs for years, but, if its pioneer is to be believed, it is about to hit the big time. Earlier in the year, Semantic Web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee – known to most as the inventor of the original web – claimed: “we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything. You should be able to implement a huge amount of the dream, we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability using what we’ve got. So, people are realizing it’s time to just go do it.” The groundswell of interest in the concept in recent months culminated in a round of interviews by Sir Tim last week, in which he outlined his vision for the Semantic Web, and called for a new academic discipline of Web Science. But what is the Semantic Web, and what is Web Science? The original vision for the Semantic Web was outlined in a seminal New Scientist article by Berners-Lee in 2001, in which he described a vision of a young brother and sister trying to organise physiotherapy for an elderly parent. Using the current web, setting up these sessions would be easy – and far simpler than it would have been prior to the advent of the internet. But it is still a laborious process – search for a physiotherapist, find one that has an appointment at the right time, find one that is within driving distance. Fundamentally, it’s still a human-driven process, involving the user making Google search after Google search. The idea of a semantic web is one that presents computer-readable data instead of human-readable documents. Instead of finding all the information by manually searching and reading documents, the ultimate idea of the Semantic Web is that you could instruct your computer to do all the hard work. This would be possible because all of the important information – available appointment times, names and locations of suitable physiotherapists – could all be automatically located by a computer program using computer-readable data presented on the Semantic Web. “There’s a movement called Linked Open Data, which is to put up information about different artists and songs and CDs,” he says. “There’s another site which has got data about different places, and another site which has got data about famous people and where they were born. Now, take that data, which is public data out there on the semantic web, so you can now write a program or make a mash-up site which will do things like ‘play me all the tracks by singers who were born within a hundred miles of where I was born’, or something.” It’s the study of ways of using data on the web in this way that Berners-Lee terms “Web Science”. “Around the web itself, there are lots of different disciplines in which people are investigating the web, playing with the web, doing new bits of the web; but the study of the web itself, what we’re calling Web Science, isn’t really established as a discipline. So that’s something we’re trying to do,” he told BBC Radio 4 last week, adding that BT is providing sponsorship for a Web Science research initiative. But can the idea of a semantic web really work in practice? Whilst many companies, including Adobe, Oracle, IBM and HP have started offering semantic web tools and systems, and the rollcall of names in the W3C semantic web interest groups includes many of the biggest names in IT and engineering, it remains to be seen whether the Semantic Web will be as successful as Sir Tim’s firstborn. Graham Taylor Jul 14, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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