Companies should start organising their data for the
advent of the
Semantic Web,
Tim Berners-Lee has urged.
The inventor of the World Wide Web told Computer Weekly that
preparing for the Semantic Web and considering what implications it
might have would help organisations overcome some of the issues
associated with the web's current use in business.
He said the onslaught of spam was a potent indicator of why the
Semantic Web development programme he leads at
the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) was so necessary. "Spam works by offering
links exchange simply because this carries attention and attention
is money - economics and the web are clearly linked," he said.
All that has changed from when the web was built, said
Berners-Lee, was that in the early days the exchange of links
containing information was assumed to be between trusted
sources.
In response to the reality of unlimited linking between anyone,
the W3C is developing protocols to communicate context around those
links.
"There is a propensity to worry about the bad guys out there,
but there is also huge opportunity," said Berners-Lee. "Within the
enterprise, you already have a friendly environment to share data
effectively behind the firewall."
Berners-Lee said the key to extending the context of trusted
information via the web was the creation of a data model for
describing objects, or "tags instead of words". He said this
involved developing the
Resource Description Framework
and Web Ontology
Language, which the W3C was working on.
"There are lots of technology bits in the roadmap, including
cryptographic security and more sophisticated, trusted protocols,"
said Berners-Lee.
"We can develop ontologies of terms that will shape the Semantic
Web. Some terms everybody will share to make common, such as a link
to describe colour using a Pantone reference, for instance. Others
need developing by communities.
"The aerospace industry, for example, could get together and
decide the specific terms it will need to define, as well as using
terms from a global, shared ontology. If I am a member of many
groups, I can use their shared ontologies to help their spread
across communities. Everybody will need to do their bit."
Berners-Lee was visiting the UK to address the
School of Electronics and Computer Science at
the University of Southampton.
What is the Semantic Web?
The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web
in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language,
but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by
software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate
information more easily.
Source: World Wide Web Consortium
More on the Semantic Web
www.w3.org/2001/sw
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4
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