The Semantic Web Revisited
It has been five years since the original Semantic Web article appeared in the Scientific American magazine. Where’re we today? Where’re we heading to in the next five years?
In “The Semantic Web Revisited” (IEEE Intelligence Systems May/June 2006), Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, and Tim Berners-Lee dive into the knowledge pool of the Semantic Web and attempt to answer those critical questions.
Key issues discussed in the article:
- The Semantic Web vision remains unchanged — building a Web that not only consists of documents for humans to read but also includes data and information for computers to manipulate.
- Data integration is a key problem. The authors point out that data integration problems are common in many e-science research projects (e.g., life sciences research demands the integration of diverse and heterogeneous data sets that originate from distinct communities of scientists in separate subfields). Similar problems also exist in GIS.
- The emergence of other Web standards will encourage knowledge sharing on the Web. These standards include XHTML, URI, RDF, OWL, and Semantic Web Rules. I also think that de facto Web 2.0 technologies such as JavaScript, JSON, and XML over HTTP also helped us to innovate new approaches to communicate and share semantic knowledge on the Web.
- Semantic Web research projects are not dead projects! Current SW research projects are providing grounds for developing new semantic web technology (e.g., RDF stores and other middle-wares).
- Ontologies can be categorized into two kinds: deep ontologies and shallow ontologies. Deep ontologies are often those encountered in science and engineering, where considerable efforts go into building and developing the conceptualization. Shallow ontologies comprise relatively few unchanging terms that organize very large amounts of data.
- Folksonomies and tagging will not replace shallow ontologies. They are complementary approaches to give meanings to data on the Web. In particular, tagging are statistical in nature and employs techniques such as clustering, and ontologies will help to address semantic aspects of the future Web.
I highly recommend this article to those who are interested in the Semantic Web and interested in applying Semantic Web technology to solve real world problems. You can download a copy of the article from this site.
