Cover Image: December 2007 Scientific American Magazine See Inside

The Semantic Web In Action [Preview]

Corporate applications are well under way, and consumer uses are emerging

By Lee Feigenbaum , Ivan Herman , Tonya Hongsermeier , Eric Neumann and Susie Stephens















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Image: SLIM FILMS

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.



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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.


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  1. 1. robertbaud 07:36 AM 11/27/07

    About the box "Making the semantic web tick. The affirmation Flipper IsA Dolphin is a nonsense. Flipper is an individual and Dolphin is a class: the IsA relations applies only between classes and cannot be mentioned here! This is quite a common error, but I am astonished to see it here in a peer review article.

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  2. 2. danja_ 04:18 PM 11/30/07

    robertbaud, I assume the intention here is -

    :Flipper rdf:type :Dolphin .
    :Dolphin rdf:type rdfs:Class .

    See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/

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