WEB2.0
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MEGATREND #1_ Web 2.0
THE SEMANTIC WEB began with a simple observation: within just a few years an enormous amount of content has been generated for the World Wide Web, but most of it is only in human readable form. In order to build more sophisticated information services, some of this information needs to be readable by machines. Therefore, by extending the definition of HTML to include information that assists computers in the acquisition and understanding of the information on the World Wide Web, more powerful services could be built.
THE TECHNOLOGY being developed for the Semantic Web primarily
involves being able to express the semantics of the underlying data so that
communicating parties can be assured they have a common understanding
of the information being exchanged. In particular, the technology needs to deal
with the fact that different entities may have very different definitions for the same terms.
THE DEVELOPERS of the Semantic Web have built technology that allows data publishers to clearly express the semantics of their data. In addition, they have developed technology (called ontologies) that allow machines to reason about differing semantics so that machines can automatically connect to data sources with differing semantics and translate the data accordingly. Largely in parallel to the evolution of the Semantic Web, the IT industry has developed the idea of "Web services", which are a way of expressing data processing services and the data they consume so that they can be used over the Internet.
WEB SERVICES share some of the technologies and many of the same
challenges as the Semantic Web. For example, a wide variety of semantics
across the industry make it difficult to connect the consumer of a service
to the service provider. It is only natural that the people working on Web services technology began to apply the technology being developed for the Semantic Web to this problem to the extent that we often think of these two different technologies as intertwined.
The Semantic Web raises a number of questions. For example, how can identity and accuracy be verified when sharing information over a public network? How can we solve the complexity and confusion created by the myriad of security standards? Who will put the effort into developing all the metadata (i.e. ontologies) needed to make the Semantic Web and/or Web services frictionless? How many years will it take to develop the technologies required? And finally, why will these technologies succeed where similar efforts in the past have failed?
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