By: ws sw
Submitted: 2008-07-22 00:36:24 | Word Count: 458
Where would we be without the web? It is such an immense and rich source of information; we feel that every answer is out there. All it takes is a bit of searching...
But internet searches are often fruitless – even Google's eight (http://www.china-computer-accessories.com/Buying_Leads/ ) billion indexed web pages and vast store of data and documents. Text-based searches do what they say on the box: they find keywords within documents. But what kind of web search could quickly give you a list of foods triggering adverse reactions in elderly women taking medication for high blood pressure?
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“The current web is a web of text and pictures,” says Frank van Harmelen, a researcher in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the Free University of Amsterdam. “Data is everywhere, but most of it is locked in inaccessible databases behind websites, locked within documents, or held within silos so it can’t be linked to related data elsewhere.”
What's more, computers (http://www.china-computer-accessories.com/Companies/ ) are unable to understand the data that they find. To a computer, the number 00352 is just a series of digits. Type this into Google and the top hits are an eclectic collection of unrelated pages (usually because the number 0352 features somewhere within a code number or filename).
But a new era of the web is upon us. The ‘semantic web’ (http://www.china-computer-accessories.com/Products/ ) codes data in a way that gives meaning to words and digits in a way that computers can understand. Given just a little bit of context, applications can now recognise when 00352 is actually an international dialling prefix.
And by linking unrelated data sources, the semantic web might be able to tell you the name of the person you are calling, their email address, the cheapest carrier for calls to Luxembourg, and even link to profiles of several of your contact's friends and colleagues.
“The semantic web is a web of data,” van Harmelen continues, “It realises the vision for interoperability between data sources on the web and it gives the data meaning in a way that computers can understand and reason with it.”
From trumped-up to joined-up data
Tim Berners-Lee, the beknighted father of the web, famously said: “I have a dream for the web [in which computers] become capable of analysing all the data on the web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.”
European research has long sought to materialise that dream. Since before 2000, Europe has driven research on the semantic web and taken a strong lead on the development of concepts, underlying standards and, more recently, software and services for the semantic web. But the semantic web is not just some European pipedream. Other big forces in the world are also hearing the ‘semantic call’.
