The Evolving Web

Alice Toth, Friday, April 20, 2007 @ 2:33 pm

Semantic Web. Web 3.0. The Intelligent Web. Whichever terminology you want to use, it's a vision for the Web in which information is given explicit meaning, making it easier for machines to automatically process and integrate said information.

Currently, the Web is based mainly on documents written in XHTML, a markup convention that is used for coding a body of text, interspersed with objects such as images and interactive forms. These documents are designed to be read by people, not machines.

With the semantic web, content will be able to be expressed in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily. It involves publishing the data in a language specifically for data (Resource Description Framework (RDF)), so that it can be manipulated and combined and presented to the end user.

With RDF, data can be collected from a variety of different places (say, your
bookmarks and history or another web site) and aggregated into one
place. Because RDF has local/remote merging capability, it can
combine data from remote locations as well as local sources, resulting in the traditional bookmarks tree view containing anything
from mail messages to local files to maps of other sites.

With this vision, the Web is seen as evolving from a web of documents
to more like a web of databases. Databases are good at providing simple
answers to queries, complex or otherwise, because their software
understands the context of each entry. "215 West Superior" is
understood as an address, not just random text. Defining the context of
online data just as clearly, e.g., labeling a programmer as a person,
could result in a Web where the relevant information is published in a
more readily machine-processable and integratable form.

Some critics put forth the argument that it's unrealistic to expect
busy people and businesses to create enough metadata to make the
semantic web work. And justifiably so. Creating and maintaining these
schemas, or even adapting pre-existing ones, is far from trivial and
can itself be painstaking work. This and other criticisms will be part of the conversation as the semantic web moves forward; however, complex
problems don’t always require complex answers, to wit: the solution may
simply be developing better tools for creating metadata.

At its core, the semantic web is a vision of formatting information in
such a way that is understandable by computers. It will build on XML's
ability to define customized tagging schemes and RDF's flexible
approach to representing data. Software agents can then take on the
task of finding, sharing and combining the information. Which means
that while Hal is hard at work doing those time consuming and tedious
search chores, I’ll kick back, relax and wait for the answers.

Related posts:

1. Ajax and Design
2. A New Workflow for Web Designers
3. Design Pattern 5: Can u rd this?
4. HTML5 custom data: A possible savior for the poor, overloaded class attribute?
5. Documentation, Part 1 – the Setup

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