Evan Carroll

Many Internet professionals understand semantics and share a dedication to standards-compliant and semantic HTML markup.  But there isn’t a widespread understanding of the Semantic Web amongst professionals.  We, as professionals, think the Semantic Web is related to the semantics we build into our HTML documents.  This is a good start, but it isn’t everything.  Many of us think that the Semantic Web is for academics and isn’t relevant to our work.  As an academic and a professional, I couldn’t disagree more.

The problem is that we are tacticians.  We think in terms of how we can use the available technology to solve business and personal challenges.  We need real examples to help us contextualize the power of the Semantic Web and inspire us to put its technology to work.

At its core the Semantic Web is about transitioning from a web of documents to a web of data.  Data is at the core of every Web site.  It might be meticulously organized in a relational database, or trapped in HTML, with limited machine readability.

As Web professionals, we love data.  The mashups that littered the Web 2.0 landscape are impressive.  They are ahead of their time and as such require many developer hours to create and maintain.  The Semantic Web will enable better, faster and more comprehensive mashups.  This will be possible with common formats (like XML), encoded with rich metadata that uses ontologies (like OWL) to make relationships machine-readable.

The users of Web 3.0 will have unprecedented access to data.  Imagine that you would like to know when you could meet with a friend.  You could go to the Web and query your calendars.  Perhaps you wanted to buy a car.  Imagine a Web where every car buyer and every car seller could connect.  No need to visit multiple sites, because you can query the entire web of data.

But how will this work?  It’s simple, but not easy.  Content creators will post data using RDF (resource description framework).  That will contain metadata that clearly defines the data available and how it relates to other data. Using the metadata defined in the RDF and the relationships regulated by ontologies, users will be able to query the data with a common language (like SPARQL).  And as more data is available, additional applications will be built to help users do this, so that these technical details are transparent to end-users.  The best part is that this won’t require intensive relational databases.  It’s will be possible with flat files, distributed across standard HTTP servers.

For this endeavor to succeed we, as Web professionals, need to embrace Semantic Web technologies and help make this possible.  It’s to our benefit, and it won’t happen without us.