Web 3.0 : Questions of Semantics

Tim Berners-Lee isn't the only man behind the Semantic Web. His 2001 Scientific American article, which introduced the concept to the world, was actually written in collaboration with two other eminent -researchers, Ora Lassila and Jim Hendler. Six years on, we tracked down Professor Hendler, now director of the Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery at the University of Maryland and still one of the driving -forces behind this next-generation Internet.


Web 3.0 : An Introduction

Web 3.0: Tim, Lucy, and The Semantic Web

Web 3.0 :The Other Semantic Web

Web 3.0 :Semantics and Search

Web 3.0 : A Web Beyond Words

Web 3.0 : Tomorrow's Web, Today

Web 3.0 : An Idiot's Guide to Web 3.0

Web 3.0 : Questions of Semantics

Web 3.0 : Look, Ma, No Keywords!

Web 3.0: Versions 4, 5, 6...


Tim Berners-Lee isn't the only man behind the Semantic Web. His 2001 Scientific American article, which introduced the concept to the world, was actually written in collaboration with two other eminent -researchers, Ora Lassila and Jim Hendler. Six years on, we tracked down Professor Hendler, now director of the Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery at the University of Maryland and still one of the driving -forces behind this next-generation Internet.

Q: Does the Semantic Web idea predate your now-famous Scientific American article—or was that the first mention?

A: That's the first time the term was coined and printed in a fairly accessible place. Recently, we've been looking for the absolute earliest use of the term Semantic Web, and it seems to go a bit further back, to a few small things Tim had written. He and some colleagues were using it locally within MIT and the surrounding community in the late nineties.

Q: The Semantic Web can be a difficult concept to grasp. How do you define it?

A: What the traditional Web does for the text documents in our lives, the Semantic Web does for all our data and information. Today, on my Web page, I can build a pointer to another Web page. But I can't link data together in the way I can link pages together. I can't point from a value in one database to some other value in some other database. To use a simple example, if your driver's license number is in one place and your vehicle identification number is in another, there should be a way of linking those two things together. There should be a way for machines to understand that those two things are related.

Q: Why is this so necessary?

A: Right now, it's very difficult to browse data on the Web. I can use a search engine that gives me the results of a query and draws them as a list, but I can't click on one of those values and see what it really means and what it's really related to. Today's social networking is trying to improve this, with things like tagging. But if you typed "polish" and I typed "polish," how do we know we're talking about the same thing? You might be talking about a language and I might be talking about something that goes on furniture. On the other hand, if those two names are precisely identified, they don't accidentally overlap and it's easier to understand the data we've published. So the technology of the Semantic Web is, in a sense, the technology of precise vocabularies.

Q: And this, in turn, would allow a machine to go out across the Web and find the things we're looking for?

A: Yes. It's very hard for this to happen with just language descriptions. Our idea is to have machine-readable information shadowing the human-readable stuff. So if I have a page that says, "My name is Jim Hendler. Here's a picture of my daughter," the machine realizes that I'm a person, that I have a first name and a last name, that I'm the father of another person, and that she's a female person. The level of information a machine needs would vary from application to application, but just a little of this could go a long way—as long as it can all be linked together. And the linking is the Web part of the Semantic Web. This is all about adding meaning to the stuff we put on the Web—and then linking that meaning together.