What's new about the Semantic Web?: some questions

ABSTRACT

It is not completely clear what the Semantic Web (SW) is meant to be. Statements about it differ or, rather, the interpretations of statements about it differ. The grand view is that the SW is the core model of the way the world is, expressed in a manner that supports reasoning about this world. The modest view is that the SW is the minimal apparatus of shared generic terminology that can be used to send some carrier pigeon messages from one universe of discourse to another. The 'authorised' view presented in Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila (2001) might be regarded as intermediate. It treats the key notion of ontology as a structure of well-defined, i.e. unambiguous, concepts standing for objects, properties, relations etc, which has an accompanying logic allowing inference about the concepts. This is much like the terminological and assertional components familiar from AI knowledge representation. There is indeed no claim that everything that users may want to talk about (or all information) can be captured in this way, either descriptively or inferentially, But the belief is that, even with restricted conceptual coverage and limited inference, it will be possible to throw a large semantic net over the Web, that does far more to catch the information fish than purely syntactic hooks and with much less effort for the human fisherman. This large net can, conveniently, be made by combining many little nets with a few well-made loops. The whole rests upon a proper formal language syntactic apparatus (XML, RDF).

REFERENCES

• 1: T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler and O. Lassilia. 'The Semantic Web', Scientific American, May 2001.
• 2: M. Gorman and P. W. Winkler (Eds.) Anglo-American cataloguing rules, 2nd ed, 1988 revision, Chicago, ILL: American Library Association, 1988. http://newsblaster.cs.columbia.edu