Spinning the Semantic Web

Abstract

From the quiet new born days of early 1990s, the World Wide Web has had an exponential growth in the last decade or so. From the original goal of sharing research resources, Web today portrays a virtual world spanning from research to entertainment and e‐commerce. This growth has necessitated substantial changes in the Web model. From the purely syntactic and relatively static framework of HTML, we have moved through DHTML and XML incorporating dynamicity and extensibility, and are now en route semantic frameworks starting with RDF. These allow Web documents to be comprehensible to machines (and not just to humans) allowing software agents to access and process such information on the Web. This leads us to semantic Web, and thus to a generation of Web applications based on Web services, adaptive content delivery, etc. Spinning the Semantic Web is based on papers presented in a seminar in Germany in 2000, and sketches the vario elements of semantic Web, the issues in realising it as well as some visions of the future. The stimulating forward to the book by Tim Berners‐Lee, recently Knighted and widely regarded as the father of the Web, portrays his vision of semantic Web. The chapters explore specific issues such as ontologies, schema languages, annotations, applications, etc. The chapters are largely unorganised and presented without any cross‐linking and most chapters use a fair amount of domain jargon. The book will be of value to those seriously interested in the field.

Citation

Mukundan, S. (2004), "Spinning the Semantic Web", On the Horizon, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 74-78. https://doi.org/10.1108/10748120410544153