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The J.R.R. Tolkien of the Web

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shelob-is-jealous dept.

rhwalker22 writes "In a column titled "Lord of the Webs," The Washington Post's Leslie Walker looks at Tim Berners-Lee ("the J.R.R. Tolkien of the computer world") and the Semantic Web project. Berners-Lee was in Washington recently to tout the project: 'In his futuristic scenario, the Semantic Web offers controlled access to American health care data, plus databases charting the location and status of rivers, underground water, forests and local vegetation, along with economic data on local industries and what they produce -- all marked up in special vocabularies. Those allow scientists to run global queries across the Web, fishing randomly for correlations that might exist between where the sick people lived, worked and played -- such as a polluted stream or industrial dump.'" See an older article on the Semantic Web.

3 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Where are the controls to prevent abuse? by J1 · · Score: 4, Informative
    It's interesting that you mention this, because actually the whole concept of trust is one of the major research issues within the Semantic Web community.

    Have a look at this article by James Hendler which talks about the use of the semantic web in an agent context. Trust is right at there at the top of the layering cake that make up the semantic web.

    As for usefulness, time only can tell of course, but there is certainly a lot of research and development being invested in making this happen.

  2. Re:Updating the Internet? by Lord+of+the+Files · · Score: 3, Informative

    These aren't languages designed to display to users. Browsers might do aditional things using them, but I doubt that html is going away anytime soon. One idea is to create more effective search engines - such as one that can search for the web page of markup language named "shoe" and not return a bunch of results about sneakers. Usually the new markup languages are either embedded in html (which is wrong and bad!) or are linked to from web pages using something like the "link" tag in the page head that points to alternate pages.

    The new languages are laregly for use by automated agents, not humans.

    Basically this isn't overhauling the web as we know it so much as adding a new web in in addition.

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  3. problems with the semantic web by jesser · · Score: 2, Informative

    Via mpt: metacrap.

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