The concept of the
Semantic Web was developed more than a decade ago by the inventor of the World
Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. The Web was designed as a place where information
can reside in all its forms. But its inventor always hoped that it would enable
machines to take over much of the routine work of everyday life.
This goes hand in
hand with the long-standing desire of humans to create robots or machines that
can do all sorts of work for them. The problem is that most of the information
on the Web is encoded not for machines to read, but for people to read. The
idea of the Semantic Web is to develop languages that express information in a
form that can allow a machine not merely to find something for you, but to
understand the meaning of the things it finds.
Now, researchers in
Germany, France, Ireland, Sweden, Greece, and Switzerland, are working at
universities, businesses such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and governmental
scientific bodies, to develop software that will finally bring the Semantic Web
to your desktop. The scheme involves tagging information with codes for
meaning so that both the person and the machine can understand them. That in
turn will allow people to find and structure information in new ways on their
computers and on the Web and more effectively share it with others.
To make a quantum
leap in the utility of the computer and its interfaces with the Web, the
consortium, coordinated by the German Research Center for Artificial
Intelligence, created an organization called NEPOMUK (Networked Environment for
Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge).1 Under that umbrella
organization, they developed a comprehensive solution — including the methods,
the data structures, and a set of tools to deliver and organize information in
new ways.
Collectively, this is
known as the Semantic Desktop, which creates a rich collaborative environment
for the management of personal information and for sharing across social and
organizational boundaries. This enhanced personal workspace will give meaning
to information and allow the computer to process that information. It will
also be social, in that it will be able to connect with other desktops and
share information, according to the Web site Semanticweb.org.
This is much more
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