From the May 2001 Scientific American Magazine | 6 comments

The Semantic Web ( Preview )

A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities

By Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila

Adding logic to the Web�the means to use rules to make inferences, choose courses of action and answer questions�is the task before the Semantic Web community at the moment. A mixture of mathematical and engineering decisions complicate this task. The logic must be powerful enough to describe complex properties of objects but not so powerful that agents can be tricked by being asked to consider a paradox. Fortunately, a large majority of the information we want to express is along the lines of "a hex-head bolt is a type of machine bolt," which is readily written in existing languages with a little extra vocabulary.

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