The J.R.R. Tolkien of the Web

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.

Comments

Uh...And this has to do with Tolkien how?

[Bowie J. Poag]

Semantic Web = Bored Of The Rings.

What's with this self-discovery obsession?

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

Computers aren't ready to find resources for themselves.

Nobody (read very few people) use UDDI because it's a silly idea. "Hey, let's just set-up a computer in the machine room and let it go discover some web services....". How the hell is that supposed to work????

Likewise with self discovery of information on the semantic web. We are many many years off allowing a computer to acquire and use information on its own (in mission/business critical systems at any rate). Simply taking an information source off the semantic web without any form of human verification as to authenticity and validity is asking for trouble.

Re:What's with this self-discovery obsession?

[TuringTest]

Computers aren't ready to find resources for themselves.

Yeah, as if Google hadn't ever discovered important web pages automatically.

Re:Where are the controls to prevent abuse?

[J1]

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.

Semantic Web: The Real Deal

[rhoads]

Suppose for a moment that you were responsible for creating some kind of commercial or enterprise database. For the sake of discussion, let's imagine that it's a database which tracks a retail company's inventory. So you've got various pieces of information to track for things like product name, number, description, quantity, location, ordering information, and so on.

If you were responsible for creating this database, would you create a single table with a single column and dump every piece of information into that field? Of course not, because then the data would be meaningless -- and useless.

Well guess what? The Web is just a massive distributed database -- and right now, every piece of data is indistinguishable from every other piece of data -- just like the above example.

The Semantic Web simply provides the constructs necessary to slice and dice the Web in meaningful ways. It will enable a whole new generation of tools ... from super-accurate searching to data mining (as in the article example) to agent technology and AI.

It's revolutionary. And it's coming.

A Medium-Term Solution at Best

[Hanashi]

The semantic web idea might be the best implementation we can come up with right now, but I doubt it'll ever become very successful. It relies on content providers using tags to provide meaning to their information. Not only does this open the door to massive confusion (how do they decide which tags to use in which circumstances, and how will every semantic browser know all the tags?) but it's more work. These two factors will probably kill Semantic technology before it even gets off the ground.

IMHO, search engines will eventually be able to read and understand the context of the words users search for. If that happens, then the search engine could have semantic search capabilities built in, without relying on the content owners to provide special tags. In other words, the benefit without the extra work. I think semantic searches will eventually prove to be of great use, but won't become widespread until search engine technology can support them without changing the content in any way.

A fruit-filled-baked-goods-at-high-altitude dream, perhaps, but an achievable one (eventually).

Re:Most. Tenuous. Connection. Evar.

[KjetilK]

Tom Berners-Lee will undoubtedly and correctly be remembered as the Father of the Interweb, but not a single thing of his since then has caught on even a tiny bit. We can stop talking about him now.

Uhm, Tim Berners-Lee has his name on every recommendation that comes out of the World Wide Web Consortium. Perhaps you've heard about XML? No, he's not among the editors, but the architectural principles he put down has a very significant influence on that, as well as pretty much every other technology that comes out of there. You can argue about the merits of stuff like XML, but you can't argue about the influence of TimBL. That he pulls the strings in the background and are not in the forefront shouting buzzwords, that can hardly be held against him. But if the buzzwords are the only things that you hear, yeah, well then probably you haven't heard too much about TimBL lately.

To me, technologies that TimBL are working on is a big part of my daily life. But there are those of us who write the code and try to make things work who are creating the future, not some Genius on /.

OK, so the connection to Tolkien was probably not the strongest, but that's a minor thing, and I can't help to fear the stuff moderators are smoking when they mod a post with a knee-jerk response like this up.