semantic web

www 1.0 - 4.0

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

It is dificult to pick up on any opinion, or diagram, that fully qualifies web 1.0 -> but this diagram highlights for me the timeline. From the intial LAMP development surge of the late 90’s through to where we are now in the middle (or end?) of web 2.0, with a myriad of enabling web tools to allow rapid development and content syndication. There is a theory that anything in technology with “2.0″ is inherently a draft. Though a bit fo a broad generalisation, it is true of web 2.0.

Source: radarnetworks.com and Nova Spivack

The addition of web 4.0 is a newer terminology, as as yet undefined beyond broad semantic web and search agents. The raod map for the WWW is now clearer, with the ultimate goal of semantic web now feeling close to reality. The current issue is that the majority of data on the Web that is in this form at the moment is that it is difficult to use on a large scale, because there is no global system for publishing data in such a way as it can be easily processed by anyone.

How can this be addressed? The Semantic Web comprises the standards and tools of XML, XML Schema, RDF, RDF Schema and OWL (an ontology language for the Web). It is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database. For the Semantic Web to reach its full potential, many people need to start publishing data as RDF. Why RDF? The benefit that you get from drafting a language in RDF is that the information maps directly and unambiguously to a model, a model which is decentralized, and for which there are many generic parsers already available. This means that when you have an RDF application, you know which bits of data are the semantics of the application, and which bits are just syntactic fluff. Secondly, RDF data will become a part of the Semantic Web, so the benefits of drafting your data in RDF now draws parallels with drafting your information in HTML.