What is “The Semantic Web”? W3C starts off with a great outline:
The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and it is not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?
Why not? Because we don’t have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.
The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.
You see, we have a massive amount of data floating around, and the goal over the last decade has been to move that data to a widely-accessible source known as the Internet. This is all well and good, but the data now (for the most part) lives on its own. The idea for The Semantic Web is to describe all of the data in a way it can begin to relate to each other. Doing so will make all of our pieces of data somehow associated with lots of other data.
Over the last several years the realization is that we are swimming in an ocean of data. Some even call it a maelstrom of data. When you need a specific piece of information, you just need a way to extract that data from the ocean by using a net to fish it out. Fishing analogies aside, this method works well when needing a single bit of data with no relative data points. Type in a search to Google or Bing, and you get yourself some results. Sorting through the results and finding EXACTLY what you want can be a challenge, but as search indexing gets better and better, we have less of that to deal with. Using Semantics to describe the data landscape and how it all relates to real world objects will begin to give us the ability to find, sort, and handle information in a much more natural way. It’s the future!
Here is a great little gem about Semantic Email Addressing, written by the Logic Group, Department of Computer Science at Stanford University: Sending Email to People, Not Strings (link to PDF)
Created by Michael Kassoff, Charles Petrie, Lee-Ming Zen and Michael Genesereth
The paper poses a solution to the problem of email addresses, similar to telephone numbers, being opaque identifies. They’re not often easy to remember, and they can change over time. Semantic Email Addressing (SEA) would instead allow addressing an email to “a person” and not to an alphanumeric string separated by an @ symbol.
Get ready for some more semantic web as HTML5 becomes widespread. HTML5 is still the new hotness, and is all about using semantics to describe the web.
For more reading, check out these web links:
Wikipedia on Semantic Web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
SemanticWeb.org: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
W3C Semantic Web: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
