Semantic Web

The semantic web is all about making knowledge and information more available, faster and at less expense from the internet super highway to anyone that has a need or a desire. The solution approach being pursued by others requires everyone’s participation to be completely successful. Amblit Technologies is not waiting for their solution. It is achieving the dream by selectively identifying, indexing and interfacing to choice information, knowledge and service sites, thereby providing a valuable part of the semantic web dream today.

Semantic Web

“The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” according to Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila (The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001)

Tim Berners-Lee, one of the key founding spirits of the Internet, is driving toward its reincarnation where information isn’t only available at a web address, but where information is available and accessible by object name. A complete standards organization managed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has grown up around his new initiative (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/).

From w3c’s Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification:

The World Wide Web was originally built for human consumption, and although everything on it is machine-readable, this data is not machine-understandable. It is very hard to automate anything on the Web, and because of the volume of information the Web contains, it is not possible to manage it manually. The solution proposed here is to use metadata to describe the data contained on the Web. Metadata is “data about data” (for example, a library catalog is metadata, since it describes publications) or specifically in the context of this specification “data describing Web resources”. (http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/PR-rdf-syntax-19990105/)

In their vision of the new semantic web, participating web sites insert special vocabularies and knowledge descriptions using a new ontology language based on RDF which is also an XML derivative into their web site pages. New specialized software agents roam the web collecting these special insertions and catalog them into knowledge repositories. A web user can then accesses the information using new types of browsers that depend on these knowledge repositories and special inference engines.

In addition to the large university research community, a number of businesses are also participating in the initiative, including us in the near future. Additional information can be found at the Semantic Web Community Portal (http://www.semanticweb.org).