From the issue dated February 7, 2003
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New Web Will Enable Scientists to Share Data Across DisciplinesOne of the principal architects of the World Wide Web, Timothy J. Berners-Lee, gave a progress report last week on his latest work, which he calls the Semantic Web. Billed as a new and improved version of today's Web, the Semantic Web would foster greater productivity in science and engineering research, he said.Mr. Berners-Lee, who spoke at the National Science Foundation, outside Washington, is a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science and is director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a forum for developing standards for the Web. Current Web technology is uniquely suited for displaying documents, whether scientific papers or online catalog pages, according to Mr. Berners-Lee. But for all of its versatility, the Web has limited utility for researchers who want to share science and engineering data stored in databases, he said. Identifying and using data hidden inside complex databases is a tricky problem. But Mr. Berners-Lee believes that solving it could accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, especially in areas of interdisciplinary research that draw data from disciplines other than the researcher's primary areas of expertise. "This is about taking the data and 'Webifying' it," he said. Mr. Berners-Lee and his colleagues in the consortium are developing new Web languages that would enable global search engines to identify and retrieve all classes of data. The Semantic Web would be created when researchers and catalog companies, for example, start adding tiny standardized tags -- Universal Resource Identifiers -- to pieces of data on their Web sites and in databases. The tags, in turn, would point to machine-readable vocabularies and a set of definitions that would let computers "understand" the data. Another feature of the Semantic Web, Mr. Berners-Lee said, would be its encyclopedic collection of taxonomies and inference rules to help computers process and discover meaningful correlations in the hodgepodge of data on the Web. Semantic Web researchers are experimenting with trusted software "agents" that would automate the work of scientists by retrieving and combining information and data sets from computer-readable Web pages and databases, then sending the results off to other software programs for analysis. The Semantic Web has much in common with two other emerging technologies: Web services and grid computing. All three efforts, he said, are aimed at exploiting the potential of the Web for sharing scientific resources and for electronic commerce. Ideally, the Semantic Web would have a two-way browser, "so when you find something wrong, you can fix it," he said. "That's what I always wanted with the Web." http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 49, Issue 22, Page A25
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education