Web Redesigned With Hindsight

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."

Comments

All those fancy acronyms..

[Mz6]

and the article tells me absolutely nothing about what the technology actually does. About the only thing I saw was:
"The aim of the Semantic Web is to add metadata to information placed online, to allow it to be readable by machines. That context would enable automation of a variety of interactions. An online catalog could, for instance, connect to a user's order history and preferences to a calendar, to automatically pick out available delivery times.".

Wow... just simply amazing.. *sigh*

Anyone care to shed some light (or links) onto what RDF and OWL actually do?

Re:Web Ontology Language?

[tcopeland]

From the OWL FAQ:

Q. What does the acronym "OWL" stand for?

A. Actually, OWL is not a real acronym. The language started out as the "Web Ontology Language" but the Working Group disliked the acronym "WOL." We decided to call it OWL. The Working Group became more comfortable with this decision when one of the members pointed out the following justification for this decision from the noted ontologist A.A. Milne who, in his influential book "Winnie the Pooh" stated of the wise character OWL:

"He could spell his own name WOL, and he could spell Tuesday so that you knew it wasn't Wednesday..."