"The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of
having data on the Web defined and linked in such a way that it
can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for
automation, integration and reuse of data across various
applications."
From the Semantic Web activity
statement.
The World Wide Web has become a vastly powerful tool for
communication, research and commerce. However, its power is
limited by the ability of human users to navigate the disparate
sources for the information they require. The Semantic Web
vision is to make the Web machine-readable, allowing computers
to integrate information from disparate sources to achieve the
goals of end users (see Semantic Web
Roadmap). By augmenting web pages with descriptions of the
content they hold it becomes possible to reason about that
content. The potential impact is huge, representing a
reinvention of the world's computing infrastructure on at least
the scale of the original web. Enough of the technology is
available to build limited exploratory and demonstration
applications now. If successful, there is no reason why a
popular application could not grow with exponential speed.
Semantic web technologies could be used in many ways to
transform the functionality of the web:
- rich metadata for media and content to improve search and
management;
- rich descriptions of web services to improve discovery
and composition;
- common access wrappers for information systems to
simplify integration of disparate systems;
- common lingua franca for exchange of semantically rich
information between active software agents;
The aim is for the development of the Semantic Web to follow
a similar path to that of the World Wide Web itself. The
development of open standards is crucial if barriers equivalent
to browser incompatibilities are not to stifle the vision (see
"Four
Steps" paper). These standards, and the tools developed to
embody them, must be tolerant of errors so that new users of
these tools and approaches are not locked out. They must be
tools for Everyman, not just a small handful of experts if the
Semantic Web is to achieve the kind of exponential growth seen
by the Web itself. Not only that, but users of the Semantic Web
must be encouraged to contribute to its development. According
to internet pioneer Vinton Cerf: "It means staying alert for
tools that assist in the objective and even participating in
their invention. As more and more of the content of the Word
Wide Web is generated with machine understanding in mind, we
will find that the tools we use to peruse its contents seem to
allow increasingly intelligent gathering and filtering of the
knowledge contained therein. The Web will become a repository of
knowledge not only a compendium of facts" (A Semantic Approach
Adds Meaning to the Web, Reed Hellman, Computer December
1999).
Further
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