The Semantic Web, a longstanding vision for making the Web more useful to humans by making it more readable by the computers programmed to do our bidding. Originally put forth by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the Web.
"If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database" Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999.
We have two partners in this noble effort. Ourselves as web authors. Those who build and program machines to do our bidding.
- Synthesizing some of the world's best existing work in artificial intelligence (AI), including knowledge acquisition, natural language processing, and knowledge representation, as well as sponsoring targeted research to fill in certain gaps.
- Harnessing Paul Otlet's version of hypertext which holds a few important advantages over today's Web. For one thing, he saw a smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that
carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.
- Learn a new way of creating Web pages so that they display nicely in Web browsers doesn't do much of anything to help software understand their content (or context of that content). There is simply no meaning to the data. Microformats are intended to change all of
that. They do so by enabling the attachment of semantics (semantic data) to online content.
- Learn how Microformats are small patterns of HTML to represent commonly published things like people, events, blog posts, reviews and tags in web pages. How Microformats enable the
publishing of higher fidelity information on the Web; the fastest and simplest way to provide feeds and APIs for the information in your website.
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