lauri@imke

Who hasn’t spent hours in the web searching for something specific and making complex queries. Already today, there is way too much data from different sources in the net and the number of all kind of documents and unstructured HTML pages which contain no metadata is growing rapidly. There’s a need for smart applications that have the have the understanding of all the data in the net - the goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide (Markoff, 2006).

The conception of Semantic Web

The conception of the Semantic Web fas first introduced back in 1999, in Tim Berners-Lee’s book “Weaving the web“. (Moon, 2007). The idea is very simple - to put the data files of the documents to the net. The web wouldn’t be only about documents anymore, but also about the data of the documents. The data will be in a common format, so it could be understandable for all applications. Instead of World Wide Web, the web could aslo be called World Wide Database, where all the files have relations. (Spivack, 2005)

Web 2.0, the big hype at the moment, is mainly concentrated on the user-generated content (blogs, tags, wikis). There’s one minus - the data isn’t complete and easily accessible. I guess it would be quite impossible to find a restaurant that serves seafood, has wifi-connection, is open til 11pm, is close to my office and plays the music I have at my Last.fm playlist. Or if I would finally find this place, it would take a lot of time. Once computers are equipped with semantics, they will be capable of solving complex semantical optimization problems (Iskold, 2007).

Fensel (et al. 2005, 12-17) poins out that, the efficient work with the Semantic Web can be achieved only by enabling the full power of technology. Formal languages are needed to express and represent ontologies and there have to be tools, that create new ontologies using the existing ones. Annotation tools will link the unstructured information sources with metadata. Besides that, all kind of applications are needed to access the information and to make it usable for human users.

Semantic Web is Personalized Web

Semantic Web must have a strong connection with personalized web. In order to receive high quality results, in what you’re really interested in, the web applications have to know something about you. When you’re trying to find a perfect cottage house for a relaxing winter holiday, the search applications could be more precise, if they knew whether you have kids, who have special needs, you’d like to arrive the place by your car, you like sauna and cross-country skiing and some of your good friends have marked this house as excellent choice.

There are two issues concerning personlized web. The one is privacy - when you store all the information about yourself and your documents in the web, there will pop up a question about privacy. The information shoud not get into wrong hands. Tim Berners-Lee (2007) is quite optimistic about that and mentions that they are aware of the social aspect and privacy constrants. The other thing would be commercials. Imagine about highly targeted campaigns that seem to know everything about you and serve ads in which you’ll be most probably interested in. In the other hand it would be good to be advertised in the issues you’re interested in and not to see the washing powder commercials everywhere. One thing is sure - the ad-serving companies will surely clap their hands if the documents and information in the web had more meaning.

Semantic Web == Web 3.0?

Markoff (2007) comments, that mentioning the phrase “Web 3.0″ is the easiest way to start a fight at a Silicon Valley’s coctail party. It’s understandable, because nobody ever has defined what Web 3.o will be all about. But all the signs are showing that the next generation of the web will have semantic aspect. In the future, the web applications could help us for example in getting personal advice in the financial planning areas or help the high school students in finding the right college or giving hints about possible future careers.

The first Semantic Web example

I would like to point out a new web application: Twine. It’s developed by Radar networks and has been made public only a week ago. The application, which also has been called as as a “knowledge networking” application has social networking flavour, but the aim of Twine is to enable people to share knowledge and information (MacManus, 2007). It’s a combination of blogs, wikis, social software and information management systems. Twine has been said as the first mainstream application built on Semantic Web technologies.

Twine is all about the data you know - the semantic engine auto-tags each document that’s in the system. Type a note in twine, and it picks out all of the people, places, companies, books, and other types of information contained in the note, separating them out by type (O’Reily 2007). As Twine also has the social side, it makes the information much more reliable - it’s when the information is shared by your colleague or a good friend. Unfortunatelly it’s still in a private-beta status, but said to be public and starting to rock the web in spring 2008.

Alternative cases

Tim Berners-Lee points out (2007) a really interesting idea about the alternative uses of semantic web. Semantic web can be used for discovering cures for diseases. When a drug company looks at a disease, they take the specific symptoms that are connected with specific proteins inside a human cell which might lead to those symptoms. So the art of finding the drug is to find the chemical that will interfere with the bad things happening and encourage the good things happening inside the cell. This gives a wider understanding about the semantic web.

Conclusion

Semantic web is a new powerful generation of the web. It’s about collecting data about the information in the web in order to make it more usable and easily finded. I’m really looking for Twine and the other new semantic web applications to show up, so they could redefine our understanings about the web. As Tim Berners-Lee said (2007), the Semantic Web language in its heart is very easy, it’s all about the relations between things. Semantic Web, whether it will have the codename Web 3.0 or something even more fancier, is most definetely the next big thing after the social revolution in the net.

List of references

Berners-Lee, T. (2007), Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee. [Accessed 27.10.2007]

Borland, J. (2007), A Smarter Web. [Accessed 27.10.2007]

Fensel, D., Hendler, A., Liebermann, H., Wahlster, W. (2005), Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to its Full Potential. The MIT Press

Iskold, A. (2007), The Road to the Semantic Web. [Accessed 27.10.2007]

MacManus, R. (2007), Twine: The First Mainstream Semantic Web App? [Accessed 27.10.2007]

MacManus, R. (2007), 10 Future Web Trends. [Accessed 27.10.2007]

Markoff, J. (2006), Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. [Accessed 27.10.2007]

Markoff, J. (2007), What I Meant to Say Was Semantic Web. [Accessed 27.10.2007]

Moon, P. (2007), The future of the Web as seen by its creator. [Accessed 27.10.2007]

O’Reily, T. (2007), Web2Summit: Radar Networks Unwinds twine.com [Accessed 27.10.2007]

Schofield, J. (2007), Twine — Facebook plus Wikipedia equals Web 3.0. [Accessed 27.10.2007]

Spivack, N. (2005), Towards a World Wide Database. [Accessed 27.10.2007]