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⟶ CISD and DCI ⟶ Literature ⟶ W3C UK News (1998-2006)
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Issue 67: July 2003

Editorial: The Semantic Web - now and yet to come

The Semantic Web was originally proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1998 in his overview of the future of the web. The proposal was elaborated in an article in Scientific American in 2001, and is now taking shape. The Semantic Web is one of the three directions that W3C is trying to advance the Web - the other two being Web Services and further User Interaction advances.

" The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." -- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001

One of the foundations of the Semantic Web is that it is designed to support progressive return on small investments. Unlike earlier visions of Artificial Intelligence that have required massive investment before their was any reward, the Semantic Web vision follows a layered structure, in which small investments in each layer provide significant return on investment on their own, as well as progressing towards the larger goal.

Layered Architecture

Layered Architecture

The lowest layer of Universal Resource Locations (URL's) to identify the location of documents and the Unicode to represent the characters in those documents in all contemporary languages are well established in the existing Web. The use of XML, namespaces, and XML Schema have also become well established over the last seven years to represent hierarchically structured data in a common markup syntax. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) has now been a W3C recommendation for several years, and has found (perhaps unrecognised) acceptance in representing graph structures more complex than hierarchies as combinations of simple triples. This sounds like a mouthful of computer science jargon which is probably why it is not as recognised as it deserves. However, the point of it is that it allows simple statements to be made about anything, that can be linked together. Indeed, one of the core properties of RDF is that it supports promiscuous reification, in that it is easy to talk about what other people have said - that it to treat their comments (e.g. "Page X is a good resource on topic Y.") as objects that you can then pass comment on in turn (e.g. "When A said the above statement he was advertising his own product and not presenting an impartial judgement."). This property is key to describing things on the web, or commenting on other people's descriptions of those things.

Ignoring the technicalities of the underlying technology, the Semantic Web is beginning to provide useful applications to describe things on the web, including the following:

None of these applications is going to change the world, indeed all of them could be done years ago using the appropriate technology at that time - but each had its own technology. Now RDF is providing a common representation language for all of these descriptive problems, and will provide a common language for many more. Since one language can be used to describe the situations in all of these problems, then the same support tools can be used for all of these problems. If the same language and tools are used then the same staff with the same skills can be used, which reduces training costs, increases the size of the available staff pool, and allows the allocation of staff with the same skills to be more flexible. These are all benefits that any IT or IS manager can appreciate.

Although applications are now available which do not use the layers above RDF, those layers still have even greater potential to provide business critical applications. The layers in the diagram above RDF are beginning to attain reality too, although not yet such essential or useful applications. The Ontology layer has attained reality in the language OWL which is currently at the Last Call Working Draft stage in the W3C standardisation process. The OWL formalism has grown out of European and US funded research projects such as OIL and DAML as well has massive exposure within the vocabulary definition research community and has already got sufficient adoption to justify further investigation. This ontology layer is required to provide the vocabularies to support the two most attractive scenarios of semantic web application: to resolve data integration from semantically heterogeneous databases, and to resolve the composition of web services into larger business processes.

The next layer in the diagram - Logic - is less clearly defined at present. There are several contenders for this technology including as front runners RuleML and N3 from Tim Berners-Lee recently described at a tutorial at the World Wide Web Conference. Both provide rules to describe knowledge and potential inferences, and both provide inference engines to chain together those inferences into a logical chain of reasoning. However, the long standing questions about the architecture of such systems persist and apply to these too: how does the user set the priorities of rules that might conflict; which order of search should be applied to the rules (breadth, depth or mixed search first); which order should the rules be chained in - forward from the current state to a conclusion, or backward from a conclusion to the required premises, are library models provided for a set of problem task types or are all cases sufficiently unique to justify original design ? Even once these are answered there remain questions of efficient implementation to be resolved as measured against different sets of test cases or scenarios.

The top two layers of Proof and Trust are open to much interpretation and academic and industrial research at present in various parts of the world.

The Semantic Web has received considerable publicity recently both in the recent World Wide Web Conference in Budapest and in the European Semantic Tour of W3C. The opening paragraph noted that the Semantic Web was one of three technological directions in which W3C was progressing the web. Of course these three are not independent, and much of the development of the Semantic Web interacts with its use by Web Services technology to describe those services and allow them to be discovered as reources or composed together or brokered (e.g. "which is the cheapest, fastest, most reliable or highest quality service to meet my requirements?"); equally, no content will ever be developed for the Semantic Web until the User Interaction issues are resolved and knowledge acquisition problems are overcome. None of these three directions can result in progress alone, and each is interdependent on the other two.

First Latin American web congress, Santiago 2003 (call for papers)

The First Latin American web congress will be held in Santiago on November 10-12 2003.

International researchers, technologists, and leaders from academia, industry, and government will gather at LA-WEB to present, demonstrate, and discuss the latest developments of the Web and how they can be used to empower the Latin American Web.

The technical programme will include refereed paper presentations, alternate track presentations (see below), plenary sessions, panels, and poster sessions. Tutorials will precede the main program.

During the past years, Chile has been the most stable growing economy in the region, and is one of the regional leaders in information technology and telecommunications. Santiago, with more than 5 million inhabitants, is not only the capital of Chile, but also its financial and administrative heart. The city was founded in 1541 and is located at the foot of the Andes Mountains and only one hour away from the Pacific Ocean, thus being the ideal point to start tours to the north (desert), south (lakes and glaciers) or west (Easter island).

Beta release of Adobe SVG Viewer

Adobe is pleased to announce a new Technology Preview release of the Adobe SVG Viewer. This release of Adobe SVG Viewer "ASV6" represents the first public availability of Adobe's next generation SVG viewing technology. The release can be downloaded at the adobe web site

The goal with this release is to allow pioneering SVG developers to experiment with and provide feedback on new features, particularly those under consideration for SVG 1.2. This feedback will help both the SVG Working Group as it specifies SVG 1.2 and help Adobe as it implements against this specification. This release is intended for developer experimentation purposes only and should not be used for normal SVG viewing purposes. For this release, we are only providing a Windows build. Most of the testing has been restricted to Windows XP and IE. It may work on other versions of Windows and with Netscape (4 and 7). For more information about usage of this release, refer to the accompanying Public Beta license agreement.

To provide feedback to the World Wide Web Consortium about SVG 1.2, send email to www-svg@w3.org. To report bugs and/or provide implementation feedback to Adobe, please go to the SVG Zone on Adobe.com (http://www.adobe.com/svg).

W3C Process Document and Publication Rules Published

1 July 2003: W3C announced the 18 June 2003 W3C Process Document is operative. Produced by the Advisory Board and reviewed by the Membership and Team, the document describes the structure and operations of the W3C. Among the changes are new document maturity levels, rules for amending Recommendations, and an enhanced liaison process for W3C work with partner organizations. The companion W3C Publication Rules have been updated and are public.

Amaya 8.1a Released

15 July 2003: Amaya is W3C's Web browser and authoring tool. Version 8.1a is a bug fix release with user interface, annotation, XHTML, HTML, MathML, SVG, and CSS enhancements. Download Amaya binaries for Solaris, Linux and Windows, and Debian and RPM packages. Source code is available. Visit the Amaya home page.

XML Core Working Group to Examine XML Profiling

11 June 2003: The XML Core Working Group will examine profiles or subsets of XML. The Technical Architecture Group (TAG) examined the issue and concluded that it was an area that the XML Core group can best explore. Should you have any questions, please contact the XML Core Working Group co-Chairs Paul Grosso and Arnaud Le Hors, or the W3C XML Activity Lead, Liam Quin.

Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages Republished

13 June 2003: Updated for The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0, Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages has been republished as a Unicode Technical Report and a W3C Note. These guidelines cover the use of Unicode with markup languages such as XML. They are published jointly by the Unicode Technical Committee and the W3C Internationalization Working Group and Interest Group. Read about the W3C Internationalization Activity.

SOAP Version 1.2 Is a W3C Recommendation

24 June 2003: The World Wide Web Consortium today released SOAP Version 1.2 as a W3C Recommendation. The Recommendation is four documents: the SOAP Version 1.2 Primer, SOAP Version 1.2 Messaging Framework, SOAP Version 1.2 Adjuncts, and the SOAP Version 1.2 Assertions and Test Collection. Developed by the W3C XML Protocol Working Group, SOAP Version 1.2 is a lightweight protocol for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment such as the Web. Read the announcement, the press release, the testimonials, the changes and benefits and the FAQ.

OWL XML Presentation Syntax Published

13 June 2003: The Web Ontology Working Group has released XML Presentation Syntax for the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as a W3C Note. The Note suggests one possible XML presentation syntax and includes XML schemas for OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, providing advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read about the Semantic Web Activity.

W3C Team Talks

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New W3C Members

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