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.

   
Already a Digital subscriber? Sign-in Now
If your institution has site license access, enter here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
All five authors have participated in various projects to develop Semantic Web technologies. Lee Feigenbaum, formerly at IBM, is vice president of technology and standards at Cambridge Semantics, Inc. Ivan Herman leads the Semantic Web Activity initiative at the World Wide Web Consortium. Tonya Hongsermeier is corporate manager of clinical knowledge management and decision support at Partners Healthcare System. Eric Neumann is executive director of Clinical Semantics Group Consulting. Susie Stephens was principal product manager at Oracle Corporation and has recently become principal research scientist at Eli Lilly and Company.