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Revised: Oct 4 2007

News Flash: Wikipedia's and W3C's Definitions Of Semantic Web Have Changed !

Wikipedia has a new definition of the Semantic Web.

Oct 21 2008: the Wikipedia entry for "Knowledge Technologies" deleted recently, we seem to be going backwards ...

New Definitions for 'Semantic Web Rule Based Systems' ?

Many of the potential obstacles to adoption of the Semantic Web are similar if not identical to the prbblems faced by rule-based systems in the late 1980s. Therefore, the business rules methodology may be a good guide for development of the Semantic Web.

First, some basic principles.

Updated Oct 20 2008: new link

A really excellent example of what can be accomplished with a pragmatic approach to implementing RDF and Semantic Web applications, by Drs. Marwan Sabbouh and Joseph K. DeRosa at the Mitre Corporation. They use OWL ontologies to map between databases in three basic steps:

1. Express any software component’s formalism as an ontology,
2. Map the component’s ontology to the domain ontology, and thus
3. Integrate components at the semantic level without writing integration code.

Note: the article needs updating.

The Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities project ( SIOC ) has revised their web site. The content is better organized, more accessible and interactive ( using the Drupal CMS by the way ). The one-page guides provide a quick introduction to SIOC.

The AAAI seems to be rumbling to life. An extended quote from their call for participation in the upcoming AAAI 2008 Spring Symposium Series ( with a few explanatory links inserted ):

According to the Google Base site ( beta ), it is:

... a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which we'll make searchable on Google (if your content isn't online yet, we'll put it there). You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches. In fact, based on your items' relevance, users may find them in their results for searches on Google Product Search, Google Maps and even our main Google web search.

Key features:

From their SEKT in a Nutshell brochure:

SEKT is a European research and development project launched in January 2004 with a lifetime of three years ...

... SEKT is developing automated techniques for extracting meaning from the Web. By generating structured descriptions of Web pages (using ontologies) SEKT is making those pages machine-processable and enabling computers to analyse information more intelligently.

 A More Humane Machine Readable Language ?

The proponents of these markup languages represent their creations as an improvement over implementing rules by programming logic, and that is true from the standpoint of flexibility, but I'm not sure if they are any more readable than programming logic to ordinary human beings. But this make the end user completely reliant on ontology editors to interact with the final representation of the knowledge. Are markup languages the strength or the soft underbelly of the Semantic Web ?

Another tier of terminology involves the "Web 2.0", or sometimes "Web 3.0". It's not entirely clear what either term means. One presumes that the earlier advances of "Web 1.0" and "Web 1.5" technology were restricted to improved content, database integration, graphical widgets, etc. However, far from clarifying definitions, using the term "Web X.0" seems to generate yet another level of debate on its own.