By Leslie Walker
wasingtonpost.com
January 30, 2003
SLIS Summary
Tim Berners-Lee could well be the J.R.R. Tolkien of the computer world. Tolkien created a fantasy world in which characters used languages he invented. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, a system built on "languages" he largely created. He's now working on a sequel, called the Semantic Web.
"It is a paradigm shift, like the original World Wide Web," Berners-Lee, director of the MIT-based World Wide Web Consortium, recently told scientists gathered at the National Science Foundation.
For the most part, corporate America hasn't bought into Berners-Lee's vision. Yet much as Tolkien's world sprang up like magic from his "Elvish" languages, Berners-Lee created special alchemy when he wrote HTTP, HTML, URLs and those other computer protocols with funny acronyms to form the original Web.
Berners-Lee presented a fresh batch of acronyms representing the building blocks for the Semantic Web. There's OWL (for Web ontology language), RDF (resource descriptor framework), URI (uniform resource identifier) and DAML (Darpa agency mark-up language).
The codes are designed to add meaning to the global network in ways that make sense to computers, not humans. This machine-readable intelligence would come from hyperlinked vocabularies that Web authors would use to explicitly define their words and concepts as they post their stuff online. The idea is the codes would let software "agents" analyze the Web on our behalf, making smart inferences that go far beyond the simple linguistic analyses performed by today's search engines.
This presumes that people will annotate their Web data in advance using URI, RDF and OWL codes. At this point, the code-creation process still isn't finished. There's ongoing debate, too, about the logic and rules that will govern the complex syntax, including what privacy rules should govern access to the data. The World Wide Web Consortium is attempting to set these standards, leading a collaborative effort among scientists around the world.
Questioned about whether the Semantic Web could collide or be superseded by a parallel effort by leading software vendors to create business automation software known as "Web services," Berners-Lee said he hoped the two would become interoperable after they're finished. Web services are about "remote operations," he explained, meaning they provide a way for disparate computers and devices running different software to communicate over the Internet. The Semantic Web, he said, is more about "expressing things in data and making the data reusable."
Proponents of both often talk about how they'll help automate the same tedious tasks online, such as researching travel itineraries and pricing data from various sources. Berners-Lee said he used Semantic Web syntax to write a software program that pulls down all his financial statements from his bank's Web site and then automatically spits out a completed tax return for him at the end of the year. Software vendors often describe similar scenarios using Web services.
International Business Machines (IBM) has been at the forefront of the Web services movement. Bob Suter, IBM's director of Web services, said he viewed the Semantic Web as an "adventurous research project" with noble goals, though he expressed skepticism that enough people would embrace its elaborate mark-up requirements to make it useful.
"The fundamental problem is people are going to be lazy about adding all this extra information to their Web pages," Suter said.
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Posted February 06, 2003