Tim Berners-Lee (W3C) and the Semantic Web
December 11, 2000
W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee (and father of the World Wide Web) is
still very keen on the theme of the Semantic
Web. Tim first used this term in late 1998, as WDVL covered in
our WWW8 report, in the section entitled Tim Berners-Lee: Challenges of
the Second Decade. Semantics, which refers to meaning as opposed
to format, is near and dear to TBL's vision of the Web; he has long
been an active proponent of RDF,
Metadata, and
related efforts. Tim is interested in the machine processable aspects
of the Web. He gave an example of semantic links: consider that the
concept of zipcodes is represented by many different column names in
databases around the world, but if one URN (Uniform Resource
Name) was associated with all zipcode variations, it could effectively
connect all such variants.
Of particular interest is Tim's revised
architecture slide which you might like to compare to his Oct.
1997 Data Format
Architecture diagram. In the recent
diagram, Tim mentioned characteristics of each layer:
- RDF + Schema - very expressive and open, non-constraining,
minimalist
- ontology layer - more metadata (e.g., uniqueness of a
resource, transitive property)
- logic layer - an inference engine could explain how it
followed the semantic links that it did
- proof layer - engine could then validate proofs about the
semantic relationships
He said that "XSLT turns
out to be a godsend" because of its report generation and extraction
capabilities. Tim also predicted that there will soon be a
convergence between RDF and Topic
Maps.
He said there really is no killer app for the Semantic Web (email
is considered the killer app for the first generation Web). Instead,
the killer app will be the first one encountered by each person that
shows them the power of a semantic approach.
Fun With Numbers
What Happened at XML 2000?
XTM (XML Topic Maps) and Topic Maps for Portals
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