NEW YORK -- The designer of the World Wide Web--Tim Berners-Lee--would like to see the global content network morph into a giant transactional database, he says.
The British researcher described his vision of what he calls the Semantic Web in a keynote speech at the 13th annual World Wide Web conference here this week. He presented the design in a paper written six years ago, and has been working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on steadily laying its framework.
Progress Report
The past few months included an important milestone for Semantic Web development. Two foundational standards, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL), became W3C recommendations in February, indicating the group considers them ready for widespread adoption.
"There was a lot of pain and sweat and tears and discussions and arguments" in getting RDF and OWL to the level of accepted standards, Berners-Lee said. He expects phase two, now in progress, to be more fun: "I hope it'll be very exciting. We'll start to get more satisfaction back from actually building applications and seeing them connect together."
The aim of the Semantic Web is to add metadata to information placed online, so it can be read by machines. A number of interactions could then be automated. For example, an online catalog could connect to customers' order history and preferences as well as their calendars, to automatically pick available times for a product delivery.
Projects involving Semantic Web technologies are already under way at several organizations. Boeing is exploring semantics-based applications for information and application integration and interoperability, and for knowledge management. Adobe Systems has built into its products Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP), an RDF-based metadata system that links contextual information with content files.
Partly as a proof-of-concept for the Semantic Web, conference organizers are developing a Web archive of photos from the current and past gatherings, complete with metadata annotations.
Berners-Lee encouraged attendees to go out and Semantic Web-enable anything they can online.
"We're going to have to bootstrap things in the short term," he said.
Other Web Projects
While most of Berners-Lee's speech focused on Semantic Web development, he touched briefly on other Web infrastructure issues, including the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' push to expand the Web's pool of top-level domains.
Berners-Lee said he's wary of the fragmentation that comes with domain expansion, and prefers to see domains added only when they're needed for innovative social or technical systems.
He's unimpressed by many of the social additions under consideration, such as .xxx for pornography or .mobi for content that is optimized for mobile devices. Definitions vary on what counts as "adult content," and the needs of mobile devices are varied and constantly evolving, he said. Berners-Lee suggested that such top-level domains are aimed at solving problems better addressed through content filters and affinity portals.
He also praised the work done on advancing several past W3C initiatives, like Cascading Style Sheets, a standard now widely used.
"It's worth celebrating that, actually, we've come a long way with some of this stuff," Berners-Lee said.
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