The bright future of Semantic Web

Semantic Web is a nascent vision of Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the WWW and the director of the W3C, which was first mentioned in 1999 by Berners-Lee but properly unveiled in 2001 in the “Scientific American” magazine by Berners-Lee and colleagues.

Semantic Web is a component of ‘Web 3.0′ and is a vision of information that is understandable by computers so that they can find, combine and act upon information on the Web. It is not a replacement for the WWW but rather an enhancement or an extension which gives the WWW a greater utility by allowing people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications and websites.

In essence, the technologies that would make the Semantic Web vision come true include:

1. a common language for representing data that could be understood by different types of software agents
2. ontologies that translate information from disparate databases into common terms
3. rules that allow software agents to reason about the information described in those terms.

The Semantic Web adheres to the W3C standards and the W3C has already released appropriate languages and technologies [Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL), etc.] to provide an environment for accessing data from diverse sources, integrating that data, querying it and drawing inferences using vocabularies. For example, RDF and OWL are used to create vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies, which are stored in RDF repositories, while SPARQL is emerging as a query language for RDF data.

As different Semantic Web software tools are constantly being development, the principles of the Semantic Web have already been employed in the tagging systems that have flourished on the Web including delicious, digg and the DOI system, and in custom tags available on social networking sites such as Flickr and MySpace. There is also a healthy industry growing around the Semantic Web including:

• startups (Top Quadrant, C&P, Talis, Zepheira, Cambridge Semantics, Garlik, OpenLink, iSOCO, Franz Inc., Sandpiper, Aduna, Faviki, Twine, etc.)
• big corporations offering tools (IBM, Oracle, HP, Adobe, Profium, etc.)
• other companies using it in some way or other (Novartis, Sun, Eli Lily, EDF, Yahoo!, Google, FAO, Bankinter, etc.)

The future of the Semantic Web seems promising as, according to Gartner report from May 2007, “by 2012, 15% of public Web sites will use more extensive Semantic Web-based ontologies to create semantic databases (0.6 probability)”. However, Wikipedia lists some of the major challenges for the Semantic Web including vastness (48 billion pages on the WWW), vagueness (imprecise concepts like “young” or “tall”), uncertainty (precise concepts with uncertain values), inconsistency (logical contradictions) and deceit ( intentional misleading between the producter and the consumer of the information).

Only the time will show how successful the vision of the Semantic Web really is!