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November 19, 2007
“The first step is putting data on the Web in a form that machines can naturally understand, or converting it to that form. This creates what I call a Semantic Web-a web of data that can be processed directly or indirectly by machines.”–Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, Harper San Francisco, 1999
The goal of this chapter is to demystify the Semantic Web. By the end of this chapter, you will see the Semantic Web as a logical extension of the current Web instead of a distant possibility. The Semantic Web is both achievable and desirable. We will lay out a clear path to the vision espoused by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.
What Is the Semantic Web?
Tim Berners-Lee has a two-part vision for the future of the Web. The first part is to make the Web a more collaborative medium. The second part is to make the Web understandable, and thus processable, by machines. Figure 1.1 is Tim Berners-Lee’s original diagram of his vision.
Figure 1.1
Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision clearly involved more than retrieving Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) pages from Web servers. In Figure 1.1 we see relations between information items like “includes,” “describes,” and “wrote.” Unfortunately, these relationships between resources are not currently captured on the Web. The technology to capture such relationships is called the Resource Description Framework (RDF), described in Chapter 5. The key point to understand about Figure 1.1 is that the original vision encompassed additional meta data above and beyond what is currently in the Web. This additional meta data is needed for machines to be able to process information on the Web.
Tags: Development, semantic, wwwRelated posts
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