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Web Redesigned With Hindsight

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the just-give-me-two-way-links dept.

Randy Sparks writes "Tim Berners-Lee has been speaking about his vision for the Web. He proposed the Semantic Web six years ago and it's taken that long for the W3C to ratify his plans for Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL). Effective the Semantic Web is the Web as we know it put into database form and with added metadata. You can read more about it over on MacWorld and see a Semantic Web proof-of-concept at the Web Archive."

9 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. Some open source semantic web projects... by tcopeland · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...are available on SemWebCentral . There's even an OWL mode for Emacs!

    There are also some tutorials and such-like.

    --
    The Army reading list
  2. Humane Explanation of the Semantic Web Concept by LionKimbro · · Score: 3, Informative

    For those wondering what the Semantic Web is behind all the computer babble:

    The Semantic Web Cereal Box analogy

    Plain Talk.

  3. Re:admittedly by kalidasa · · Score: 2, Informative

    Email has nothing to do with the web. They are two different systems using the same Internet protocols. And we used to have two different webs: the WWW, and it's older cousin, gopher. Know anyone using gopher anymore?

  4. Weaving the Web by Milo+Fungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    The semantic web was discussed at some length in Weaving the Web - The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. I picked up that book for something like $5 at my university's bookstore in the discounted rack. That's one of the more interesting books I've read about computer history, and it got me thinking a lot about web standards. I have since learned CSS and XHTML and I've vowed to never go back to proprietary "HTML" hacks. The new way is better, anyway.

    The semantic web doesn't make a lot of sense to people who were introduced to the web through commercial means in the mid-to-late 90's (which is most people). But it makes perfect sense in light of what Berners-Lee was originally trying to do with the web. It has gone a long way to degenerating into Just Another Way to Market Stuff to Millions of People®.

    Two points were most interesting to me in Weaving the Web:

    • The original web server and browser written by Berners-Lee was a read/write interface. The browser was an HTML editor, and you could edit pages that you viewed from the server. This makes absolutely no sense to us now, because we've been trained to think of the web as a publishing medium instead of a collaborative medium. The early popular browsers, most notably Mosaic, didn't support editing. This bothered Berners-Lee and he continually requested that they add this feature. He was still thinking of a collaborative web, moving in the direction of the semantic web. The Mosaic (and later Netscape) developers were thinking more about commercialization.
    • Tim Berners-Lee at one time was suggesting to CERN (who owned the intellectual property rights to his browser and server, as well as the http protocol) that they relase it all under the GPL. His main goal was to "get it out there" so that more people could work on it, use it, and improve it. It was explained to him that businesses would be reluctant to develop web technologies because of the viral nature of the GPL, so it was released under a BSD-style license that CERN approved.
  5. Re:All those fancy acronyms.. by telbij · · Score: 3, Informative

    Seriously though, if you really want to know, read this instead of asking the unwashed Slashdot masses.

  6. Re:The flaw in the Semantic Web by truthsearch · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is why groups come up with schemas and ontologies to share.

    --
    Developers: We can use your help.
  7. Re:All those fancy acronyms.. by Otto · · Score: 4, Informative

    RDF specifies how you can assign properties to things. Like the "manufacturer" of that computer you're looking at is "Dell" or the "creator" of this post was "Otto" or what have you. It lets you describe facts about things.

    RDF Schema lets you describe general classes of things. Like that "Otto" is a "person" which makes him a member of "livingPeople" which is a subset of "allPeopleWhoEverLived" and so on. It lets you group things into vocabularies.

    OWL lets you define relationships between those vocabularies and draw interferences using those relationships. Since "Otto" and "Mz6" are each a "person", they're the same type of thing. Since this thing is a "computer" that was "manufactured" by "Dell" which is a "company", then it is not a "person" because "companies" are not in the schema of "people".

    That sort of thing, broadly put. Anyway, it lets you define stuff in such a way that a computer can understand it and draw meaningful conclusions about the relationships there. The examples are pretty vague, I grant you, but it has potential. Needs a lot of advance work defining everything to get anything particularly useful out of it though.

    --
    - Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
  8. Re:All those fancy acronyms.. by LionKimbro · · Score: 3, Informative

    I feel for you.

    RDF is a way to make webs of information. Think "web" as in "world wide web"- one thing points to another thing points to another thing, and it can all point back to the original thing. (In Computer Science, this is a "graph.")

    OWL is a way to help computers reason over these graphs. You can give hints like, "If you hear people talking about POBOX's over in this one system, that's the same thing as people talking about PO-BOX's over in this other system. Note that OWL isn't AI technology; It's just an assistant to programmers working on making smarter programs.

    As for all the jargon coming out of the W3C: Yes; It is a problem. I don't know if they are working on it or not, but I hope they are..!

  9. Check out Dublin Core Metadata by Phatmanotoo · · Score: 2, Informative

    You might find Dublin Core Metadata as an easier way to start than the W3C page for OWL.