What is the Semantic Web revolution that is the topic of the day and seems to be the way things are headed now?
This web or Internet revolution is spearheaded by the W3C or World Wide Web Consortium which is actually the governing body which sets the standards everyone who uses the web must abide by.
The standards set by the consortium are a way to get users (people, organizations, universities, companies, etc.) to employ “universality”. The standards as far a browsers and authoring tools state, “We should be able to publish regardless of the software we use, the computer we have, the language we speak, whether we are wired or wireless, regardless of our sensory or interaction modes. We should be able to access the web from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet – stationary or mobile, small or large. W3C facilitates this listening and blending via international web standards. These standards ensure that all the crazy brilliance continues to improve a web that is open to us all.” W3C.org/standards.
An attempt to create relationships and connect people, places, and things.
The W3C is actually encouraging the use of semantic data in websites in an attempt to convert what is now a web full of semi-structured and unstructured data. In this context, semantic data means a connection or relationship between people, places and things.
The semantic web is not a new idea:
Although the term is starting to be used more and more, it is not a new idea. A description of the evolution of the web as it was to a new web of data was written in 2001 in a Scientific American magazine article by Berners-Lee.
Why speak only of the web; what about the Internet?
Many people use these two terms interchangeably but they refer to two very different things.
The Internet is a massive infrastructure of interconnected computers around the world. It is through this network that computers can communicate with one another through language protocols. The Internet includes SMTP, IM, FTP, e-mail, and so on. The Internet, therefore is more conceptual in nature and not an actual “entity” as we understand entities.
The web, as we understand it, is how information goes out over the Internet. It can also be said that it is a system or set of Internet servers with documents that are formatted in a markup language known as HMTL or Hyper-Text Markup Language. This language supports links on a particular page, a particular website, or links to other pages or data on other websites.
The web uses browsers to access documents on the Internet in the form of web pages (websites) which can contain video, audio, graphics, text, and so on.
We speak of the web and not the Internet because they don’t have a synonymic relationship, or one is not the same the other.
Tim Berners-Lee and Karen Bartleson speak about open standards in the following video:
How does knowing all this help me get traffic to my website? More in the next post.
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