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An old concept from AI, the semantic network, may have a second life in the Semantic Web. In a semantic network, ontologies of distinct types are interpreted within evaluation networks that get their meaning from the semantic relations in which they participate. In a sense, the subjects of the ontolgies discover their roles by consequence of relationships rather than by declaration or assignment.

The End of Google ?

On June 26, 2006 at 5:20am EST, the Evolving Trends web site published an article entitled "Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?". By June 28th, two days later, the article had reached 650,000 people - by July 1st, it was being referenced by over 6,000 other sites and had been read by close to 2,000,000 people.

Swoogle

A very interesting phenomena is Swoogle, a sort of Google for the Semantic Web

There is also an interesting comment on the Swoogle Blog, probably belonging more properly to previous section.

The Object Web

The ideas of a "Semantic Web" had been around in various guises for several years prior to the Scientific American article. One precursor of the Semantic Web was the idea of "Web Objects" or the "Object Web" kicking around in the mid-1990s. The OMG was a big part of that phase of development of the technical infrastructure.

How did the Semantic Web begin ?

As most things do, the Semantic Web started small. An article in the May 2001 issue of Scientific American described a futuristic world where software agents automatically schedule an entire series of medical treatments via the Semantic Web.

The article states that:

From the W3.Org site

Opera has several browser plugins and lively projects to build support for the Semantic Web.

One of most interesting plugins is the Tabulator RDF Browser Plugin. It's one of the few RDF tools that actually works.

The Tabulator Developers Notes ( and source code ) at MIT's DIG-CSAIL.

Interesting article on the slow takeoff of the Semantic Web.

Semantic web technology is marred in a chicken/egg paradox. The technologies are generally not useful unless they are adopted and implemented on a large scale and people are not willing to invest in implementing them unless they are useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that there are very high technology, business, and social barriers to implementing the semantic web.