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.

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: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.