Making a Semantic Web

If you’ve paid any attention to the web standards discussions, you may have heard the phrase “Semantic Web”, or perhaps even been pressured to use standards with names like “Dublin Core Metadata” or “RDF”. If you’ve attempted to read any of the available documentation on these topics, you were probably intimidated by terms such as “reify” and all sorts of artificial intelligence concepts. This document attempts to explain what all of this chatter really means, and help you decide which parts you should care about and why. I have tried to use common-sense, real-world examples and stay away from complicated terminology. Please contact me if you find significant omissions that you would like me to correct, or if you find certain portions of the explanation unnecessarily complex.
Disclaimer: I am not responsible for evaluating any business strategies related to the subjects covered here. I was not asked by my employer to create this document, and nobody at my company endorsed or reviewed it. This is simply my own personal perspective after recently researching this topic, and I reserve the right to completely change my mind about the opinions expressed here at any time. It is nearly Valentine’s Day, and nowhere in this document do I use the word decommoditize. This paper is copyright Joshua Allen. I wrote this, and if you try to change it or claim credit, you will be taunted mercilessly.

Reinvigorating the Web

The web was pretty revolutionary, right? Before the web, we had systems like HyperCard which let us create documents and hyperlink those documents together. But the web was world-wide. Anyone with a server could publish documents for the rest of the world to see, and you could hyperlink any document to any other document. It didn’t matter if the page you were browsing was being served up by some guy in Kuwait from a Unix server, and your web site was running on a Macintosh in Boston; if you could browse the page, you could link to it. These early days were exciting indeed, but we’ve been excited about what is basically the same old web for the past ten years. Hyperlinking to everything in the universe is cool, but it’s become rather boring. Now that we have all of these document linked together every which way, isn’t there something more we can do with them?

Some Examples

Here are some examples of things that could be done to make the web a better place.

Context-aware Links

Suppose that you are browsing a web page that uses the word “reify”, and you want to know what that means. You also happen to know that you can look up any word by using a URL like http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=someword (Replace someword with the word you want to look up). If the author of the page had added a hyperlink like this to the word “reify”, you would be able to click on it to look it up. But why depend on the author? Why doesn’t your web browser let you highlight a word, and then allow you to select a command to define the word, which just replaces someword in the URL above with the text you have highlighted? Then you would automatically be taken to the definition of the word “reify”. After looking at the definition, you might still be confused by what that word really means, but it would be a neat feature, right? Suppose that the web browser could go a step further, and recognize that the phrase Grateful Dead refers to a music group. It could then link you to RollingStone.com, even if the original author of the page hadn’t bothered. In fact, such tools are available today. Though it is not the first or the only example, Comet Systems Smart Cursors is one such rudimentary tool.

Site Information

Now consider the case of browsing a page like www.news.com. What if the browser were able to detect that you were at a news.com site, and provide you with a menu option “About the owner of this site” that could pull up company information about CNET (the owner of news.com). This is similar to the above, but in this case the browser is being smart about the whole site or domain instead of words within a page.

Continue to read this article on Net Crucible…