The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web

Author: Nova Spivack

Source: Minding the planet

Download The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web.pdf

 

p16:

---

Alternatively, individuals can be provided with ways to add semantics themselves as they author information. When you post your resume in a semantically-aware job board, you could fill out a form about each of your past jobs, and the job board would connect that data to appropriate semantic concepts in an underlying employment ontology. As an enduser you would just fill out a form like you are used to doing; under-the-hood the job board would add the semantics for you.

---

 

p17:

---

As more and more semantic metadata is added to the Web and made accessible it constitutes a statistical training set that can be learned and generalized from. Although humans may need to jump-start the process with some manually semantic tagging, it might not be long before software could assist them and eventually do all the tagging for them. Only in special cases would software need to ask a human for assistance -- for example when totally new terms or expressions were encountered for the first several times.

---

 

p17:

---

One this is certain, if communities were able to tag things with more types of tags, and these tags were connected to ontologies and knowledge bases, that would result in a lot of semantic metadata being added to content in a completely bottom-up, grassroots manner, and this in turn would enable this process to start to become automated or at least machine-augmented.

---

 

p18:

---

Where might we see this content initially arising? In my opinion it will most likely be within vertical communities of interest, communities of practice, and communities of purpose. Within such communities there is a need to create a common body of knowledge and to make that knowledge more accessible, connected and useful.

---

 

p20:

---

The invention of the printing press changed this – for the first time knowledge could be rapidly and cost-effectively mass-produced and mass-distributed. Printing made it possible to share knowledge with ever-larger audiences. This enabled a huge transformation for human knowledge, society, government, technology – really every area of human life was transformed by this innovation.

The World Wide Web made the replication and distribution of knowledge even easier – With the Web you don’t even have to physically print or distribute knowledge anymore, the cost of distribution is effectively zero, and everyone has instant access to everything from anywhere, anytime. That’s a lot better than having to lug around a stack of physical books. Everyone potentially has whatever knowledge they need with no physical barriers. This has been another huge transformation for humanity – and it has affected every area of human life. Like the printing press, the Web fundamentally changed the economics of knowledge.

The Semantic Web is the next big step in this process – it will make all the knowledge of the human race accessible to software. For the first time, non-human things (software applications) will be able to start working with human knowledge to do things (for humans) on their own. This is a big leap – a leap like the emergence of a new species, or the symbiosis of two existing species into a new form of life.

---