World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee would like to
see the global content network he helped develop turn into a giant
transactional database.
In a design paper written six years ago, Berners-Lee described
his vision of the semantic web, an initiative the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) has been steadily laying the framework for ever
since.
At the 13th annual World Wide Web Conference, running this week
in New York, Berners-Lee devoted his keynote address to detailing
the semantic web's rationale and the progress and challenges
involved in its creation.
The past few months included an important milestone for semantic
web development. Two foundational standards, the Resource
Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language
(OWL), became W3C recommendations in February, a sign that the
group considers them ready for widespread adoption.
"There was a lot of pain and sweat and tears and discussions and
arguments" in getting RDF and OWL to the level of accepted
standards, Berners-Lee said. He expected phase two, now in
progress, to be more fun. "I hope it'll be very exciting. We'll
start to get more satisfaction back from actually building
applications and seeing them connect together."
The aim of the semantic web is to add metadata to information
placed online, to allow it to be machine readable. That context
would enable automation of a variety of interactions. An online
catalogue could, for instance, connect to a user's order history
and preferences, and to a calendar, to pick out available times for
a product delivery.
Projects involving semantic web technologies are already under
way at several organisations, including Boeing, which is exploring
semantics-based applications for information and application
integration and interoperability, and for knowledge management.
Adobe Systems has built into its products Adobe XMP (Extensible
Metadata Platform), an RDF-based metadata system that links
contextual information with content files.
Partially as a proof-of-concept for the semantic web, conference
organisers are at work on a web archive of photos, complete with
metadata annotations. The project website is
http://w3photo.org/.
Berners-Lee encouraged attendees to go out and semantic
web-enable anything they can online. "We're going to have to
bootstrap things in the short term."
While most of Berners-Lee's speech focused on semantic web
development, he touched briefly on other web infrastructure issues,
including Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' push
to expand the web's pool of top-level domains (TLDs).
Berners-Lee said he was wary of the fragmentation that comes
with TLD expansion, and prefers to see domains added only when they
are needed for innovative social or technical systems.
He is unimpressed by many of the social additions under
consideration, such as .xxx for pornography or .mobi for content
optimised for mobile devices. Definitions vary on what counts as
"adult content", and the needs of mobile devices are varied and
constantly evolving, he said. Berners-Lee suggested the TLDs are
aimed at solving problems better addressed through content filters
and affinity portals.
He also praised the work done on advancing several past W3C
initiatives, such as Cascading Style Sheets, a standard now widely
used.
"It's worth celebrating that, actually, we've come a long way
with some of this stuff," he added.
Stacy Cowley writes for IDG News
Service