The Semantic Web
Alan Kotok
Associate Chairman
World Wide Web Consortium
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
This talk will focus on the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and how it is enhancing the value to society of the World Wide Web by adding semantic content.
The mission of the W3C is "Leading the Web to its full potential". To accomplish that mission, the W3C has established centers of expertise at research institutions on three continents. Under the leadership of Director Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, the W3C Team provides architectural guidance to a process designed to create open standards for how the Web will operate.
The W3C is organized as a consortium of commerical enterprises, research laboratories, government agencies and other assorted organizations. The membership funds the operation of the consortium. The membership also provides most of the labor which goes into the development of the W3C Recommendations, which are the primary output of the W3C. Through its ties to MIT and the other Host Sites, W3C can maintain a vendor-neutral forum for the advancement of the Web.
In the four and a half years since its establishment, the W3C has produced some 16 Recommendations on subjects from how to present Web content, to how to provide labels for child protection, to the specification for the new information representation language, XML. At present there are some 25 Activities open, each working on some aspect of advancing the capability of the Web. These activities are grouped into four domains: Architecture, User Interface, Technology and Society, and the Web Accessibility Initiative.
In recent years, the W3C has shifted its concentration from harmonizing multiple versions of the basic Web capabilities to enhancing the functionality of the Web. At the present time, the Web is an excellent vehicle for human access to information. The ability to present interesting information content to people has come a very long way, but the ability for computers to assist people in reasoning with that information is minimal. Therfore, the W3C is developing approaches to make the information content inherent in Web pages more usable by software by adding explicit semantics.
Our basic approach to solve this problem is through structured metadata. Metadata is "data about data". It would not ordinarily be presented in the human interface, but would represent a machine-understandable version of what is being presented. For example, in an Electronic Commerce application of a Web-based catalog, the description, parameters and price of each item shown on the screen would also be encoded in our RDF language, which would allow the computer to recognize those items and, say, compare price with other similar catalogs.
This technology is still in its infancy. We are working with our members to develop this "Resource Description Framework" (RDF) into a standard part of the Web. Present work involves standardizing how to create and notate different "schemas" of metadata which would allow groups with common interests to develop their own vocabularies for metadata. We are also developing a language to allow digital signatures to be applied to web resources to raise the integrity of all transactions.
We look forward to increased participation of organizations from all parts of the world, and Taiwan in particular, to help us achieve our mission. To assist us connect to the Taiwan culture, we have established the W3C Office in Taiwan at the National Chiao Tung University. We hope you will contact them if interested in the W3C and its work.