Look Who is here …Semantic Web !!!

Yipee ki yay!!!! Now that’s a line (or should I say bellowing) that Bruce Willis says in the Movie Series Die Hard… What does that got to do with Semantic web…Nothing...It’s just that the whole lot of web developers must be saying something like this…Either out of sheer frustration or pure delight…

Why frustrated…Well you have barely made a horrendous shift from your traditional web developing methodologies to something called as RIA technologies and Frameworks and you are somehow getting used to all those terminologies associated with it ( Web 2.0 , AJAX, XUL, XAML, Silverlight, JS libraries…etc..God knows what else) and all of a sudden you are hearing about something called as Semantic Web, Web 3.0….Oh yes it is bound to be frustrating.

Now why delighted…Hey if you are somebody who is not kainotophobic (Don’t do a word search now…Its Fear of Change) you must be smacking your lips in anticipation...With a whole new door of opportunity opening up for you. Also the fact that Semantic web has got nothing to do with your Web 2.0, RIA or any of the existing presentation logics might be a good news. Right? Did that help J

If you are already familiar with Semantic Web and its associated terms (For E.g.: RDF, RDFS, SPARQL, OWL …It’s not the bird Owl by the way…Its Web Ontology Language… but why OWL not WOL…Hey don’t ask me…I didn’t create it) then read on…you are not going to learn anything new here J (Hey I’m kidding..Who knows I might have something up my sleeves). For those who have not yet heard about Semantic Web.

What is Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database.

By the Way this is a vision from our very own Tim Berners Lee to see Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange. Well given the fact that he is the father of World Wide Web itself means that…there is something about Semantic web (Yeah I know…I borrowed that from the movie title, There is something about Mary). Have a look at this …This is what Mr. Tim originally expressed his vision of Semantic web as

“ I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘Intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize. ”

Ooohh…the last part is kind of scary right…machines talking to machines…Reminds you of some movies where machines take over the human control J

Instead of me blabbering about Semantic web...I think it will be better if you go through these links…They will tell you better

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web

http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

If you are somebody in hurry and wants to get a short description about Semantic web then go through this

http://dret.net/netdret/docs/wilde-einiras2005-semweb/

And a much simpler explanation at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Semantic_web:why

Need more details?

There is not much of a commercial level development happening in this area. Most of the development is secluded to the ones at University labs and R&D centers. Tool support for the development is on the rise (in fact you will find the sites flooded with tools for semantic development), but none of them can be said to be mature. Many of the biggies like Adobe, HP are trying to get a hold on this market with their products. Go through some of these links to find out more about the tools for semantic web development

http://esw.w3.org/topic/SemanticWebTools

http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=291

http://www.hpl.hp.com/semweb/tools.htm

http://www.daml.org/2003/05/swmu-tools-tutorial/Overview.html

Here is a link which contains some details about how RDF is created and used.

http://www.w3.org/TR/photo-rdf/

Unfortunately, the Semantic Web is dissimilar in many ways from the World Wide Web, including that you can't just point people to a Web site for them to realize how it's working, and what it is. However, there have been a number of small scale Semantic Web applications written up. Of course, these are rather demonstration-oriented Semantic Web projects, but it does illustrate the feasibility of applications being easily built using Semantic Web toolkits. I have registered myself for many of these application and many of them has responded saying that, they are in Beta and not ready for commercial usage…yet.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_semantic_apps_to_watch.php

If you want to know how semantic web is useful, potential advantages for Internet commerce, ROI etc. read this one

http://www.ida.liu.se/~yuxzh/doc/iceis-030120.pdf

Many people feel that semantic web done in a systematic manner will result in AI, something that has been in talks for a long time but never visualized or successfully attempted at. Let’s wait and see whether this stands up to its potential.