Toward the Semantic Web
When the World Wide Web went live in 1991, it consisted of static pages of text connected to each other by hyperlinks, and that's pretty much what it remained for years. But from the outset, the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, had envisioned a much more sophisticated Web, a so-called Semantic Web, which wouldn't just store data but would actually know what it meant. Now an MIT professor, Berners-Lee also directs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards body whose industrial participants include everybody from Adobe to Yahoo, and which maintains an office at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. The W3C has just published a new standard that should help bring the Semantic Web that much closer to fruition. If the current Web is like a giant text file - which you can search for instances of particular words - the Semantic Web would be like a database,...