Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential

by Dieter Fensel, Wolfgang Wahlster, Henry Lieberman

As the World Wide Web continues to expand, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to obtain information efficiently. Because most search engines read format languages such as HTML or SGML, search results reflect formatting tags more than actual page content, which is expressed in natural language. Spinning the Semantic Web describes an exciting new type of hierarchy and standardization that will replace the current "web of links" with a "web of meaning." Using a flexible set of languages and tools, the Semantic Web will make all available information -- display elements, metadata, services, images, and especially content -- accessible. The result will be an immense repository of information accessible for a wide range of new applications.This first handbook for the Semantic Web covers, among other topics, software agents that can negotiate and collect information, markup languages that can tag many more types of information in a document, and knowledge systems that enable machines to read Web pages and determine their reliability. The truly interdisciplinary Semantic Web combines aspects of artificial intelligence, markup languages, natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, intelligent agents, and databases.

392 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[CB · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not read the whole book. Not interested in very outdated and mostly technical aspects. However, parts of the book remain interesting and, reading it 15 years after it was written, I think can be fairly qualified as timelessly foundational . . . or, minimally, a snapshot of the Web *before* Google.

In fact, it's incredible that Berners-Lee's foreword was written in 1997! His comments re how the Web was formed, organizing information, Intranets, looking at how information is shared effects its purpose and how it is made, how issues of trust help determine value, intuitive user interface . . . . all very interesting.

Similarly, in the main introduction the authors review Search just as the Internet is really taking off (book written in 2003). The idea of a more or less manually and individually created metadata layer for the entire Web is, with a bit of historical perspective, a thing of its time. Although, as Berners-Lee anticipates, still possible and applicable when applied to the more limited and structured knowledge management needs of a business Intranet . . . . but perhaps even there there is just too much "uncataloged" information for such a framework.

Anyhow, all interesting background info. Many of the posed questions still relevant and worth considering.

[Tom · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book rounds up some vectors of information computing that update one's view of the web with considerations of how to classify sites and data so that their knowledge content can be systematically processed, eg by computers and not just by people. Take Douglas Lenat's Cyc project in knowledge encoding, fast forward 30 years and overlay the ideas on trying to understand web content. I suppose in an achingly slow, Kurzweil-ian, early slow part of exponential trends, the current snail's pace of semantic web encoding, which is today limited to highly specialized domains, may hit that knee in the curve and skyrocket into something palpable. But that time is not yet, and the whole semantic web endeavor feels a bit whil-o-the-wisp. It seems quite likely that the agenda will gradually yield results, but the guts of intelligence and knowledge is so achingly complex in the end that this approach is probably still too juvenile. Take 100,000 words, permute in unending combinations of indefinite length... the infinity of expression still understates the infinity of reality. This approaches the irreducible nature of reality itself in the complexity of challenge.