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The Semantic Web in Action: Scientific American

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The Semantic Web in Action: Scientific American
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The Semantic Web in Action Corporate applications are well under way, and consumer uses are emerging

Editor's Note: We are posting this feature from our December 2007 issue because of a discussion on the semantic web at ScienceOnline09

Six years ago in this magazine, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila unveiled a nascent vision of the Semantic Web : a highly interconnected network of data that could be easily accessed and understood by any desktop or handheld machine. They painted a future of intelligent software agents that would head out on the World Wide Web and automatically book flights and hotels for our trips, update our medical records and give us a single, customized answer to a particular question without our having to search for information or pore through results.

They also presented the young technologies that would make this vision come true: a common language for representing data that could be understood by all kinds of software agents; ontologies—sets of statements—that translate information from disparate databases into common terms; and rules that allow software agents to reason about the information described in those terms. The data format, ontologies and reasoning software would operate like one big application on the World Wide Web, analyzing all the raw data stored in online databases as well as all the data about the text, images, video and communications the Web contained. Like the Web itself, the Semantic Web would grow in a grassroots fashion, only this time aided by working groups within the World Wide Web Consortium, which helps to advance the global medium.

Since then skeptics have said the Semantic Web would be too difficult for people to understand or exploit. Not so. The enabling technologies have come of age. A vibrant community of early adopters has agreed on standards that ...

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http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=semantic-web-in-actio

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    • Joon Lee Joon Lee
      11 months ago


      Vodafone Live!, a multimedia portal for accessing ring tones, games and mobile applications, is built on Semantic Web formats that enable subscribers to download content to their phones much faster than before. Harper’s Magazine has harnessed semantic ontologies on its Web site to present annotated timelines of current events that are automatically linked to articles about concepts related to those events. events. Joost, which is putting television on the Web for free, is using Semantic Web software to manage the schedules and program guides that viewers use online.
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