SCN: Semantic web

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

===================


(Otis Port, BusinessWeek, excerpts)---Tim Berners-Lee...wanted to make 
the world a richer place, not amass personal wealth. So he gave his 
brainchild to us all.  

Now, the idealistic father of the Web plans an even grander gift: a next-
generation Web that almost certainly will rank as the most important 
software of this decade. Berners-Lee regards today's Web as a rebellious 
adolescent that can never fulfill his original expectations. By 2005, he 
hopes to begin replacing it with the Semantic Web--a smart network that 
will finally understand human languages and make computers virtually as 
easy to work with as other humans.  

This new project is a collaborative effort of hundreds of minds, with 
Berners-Lee as maestro. The ultimate goal: to turn the Web into a gigantic 
brain. 

Every computer connected to the Internet would have access to all the 
knowledge that humankind has accumulated in science, business, and the 
arts since we began painting the walls of caves 30,000 years ago. This 
racial memory would be a constant source of inspiration for dreaming 
sublime dreams, boosting human creativity, and solving previously 
intractable problems. 

Online commerce chores and Web services would be handled by software 
modules that snap together like toy Lego blocks. "We expect the Semantic 
Web to be as big a revolution as the original Web itself," says Richard 
Hayes-Roth, Hewlett-Packard's chief technology officer for software.  

To get there, though, Berners-Lee must navigate some very muddy 
waters. Development of the Semantic Web is being funded mainly by the 
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which he heads. Founded in 1994 
and based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the W3C is the 
guardian of Web technology and standards. Its budget relies heavily on 
membership dues from more than 400 companies. 

And while making money may not be a primary motivator for Berners-Lee, 
it's what business is all about. Conflicts, in short, were inevitable--and not 
just centering around Berners-Lee. Indeed, mediating the inevitable 
clashes among W3C's hundreds of companies, each with its own agenda, 
will be the acid test of Berners-Lee's leadership.  

A particularly thorny issue cropped up last August. A W3C committee of 13 
members, including IBM and Microsoft, proposed installing tollbooths on 
the Information Highway by allowing patented software to be included in 
W3C-approved standards. The committee reasoned that as online 
offerings grow more sophisticated, the developers of software for handling 
advanced Web services, such as supply-chain management and 
collaborative engineering, should be permitted to collect royalties on their 
investments. 

But Berners-Lee is philosophically opposed to standards that would 
impose fees, and many other W3C members, such as the Free Software 
Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, also denounced the notion. 
"Things have calmed down a bit," says Robert S. Sutor, IBM's director of e-
business standards, and the committee is now rethinking its stance. 
Berners-Lee says the mood has now shifted "strongly toward a royalty-
free position."  

Meanwhile, the W3C is taking heat on other fronts. Critics say the 
organization is moving too slowly on developing standards to ensure that 
different Web-service offerings can work together. 

Business sees major revenue growth from better tools that can deal with 
complicated travel arrangements, say, or deliver new entertainment 
options. But companies are reluctant to invest in developing such software 
until big corporations are on the same page. 

What good would it do, for example, to create a program under Microsoft's 
Web-services initiative, dubbed .Net, if it couldn't link up with a related 
program written in Java for Sun Microsystems' counterpart? Or if a 
computer-aided design program at Boeing 
Corp. were unable to talk to the company's engineering or 
manufacturing software?  

A W3C draft specification aimed at harmonizing Web services was 
published in January, 2001, "but the W3C then sat on its hands for 
a whole year" complains Uttam M. Narsu, an analyst at Giga 
Information Group. Not until late January did the W3C organize 
several working groups to tackle standards for Web services. 

"My sense is that W3C staffers are too visionary," Narsu says. 
"They're devoting too much effort to the Semantic Web, believing it 
will change the world yet again, and not enough effort to less sexy 
things that are important to business in the near term."  

The Semantic Web is certainly sexy. As envisioned by Berners-
Lee, it would understand not only the meaning of words and 
concepts but also the logical relationships among them. That has 
awesome potential. 

Most knowledge is built on two pillars: semantics and mathematics. 
In number-crunching, computers already outclass people. 
Machines that are equally adroit at dealing with language and 
reason won't just help people uncover new insights; they could 
blaze new trails on their own.  

Even with a fairly crude version of this future Web, mining online 
repositories for nuggets of knowledge would no longer force 
people to wade through screen after screen of extraneous data. 
Instead, computers would dispatch intelligent agents, or software 
messengers, to explore Web sites by the thousands and logically 
sift out just what's relevant. 

That alone would provide a major boost in productivity at work and 
at home. But there's far more.  

Software agents could also take on many routine business chores, 
such as helping manufacturers find and negotiate with lowest-cost 
parts suppliers and handling help-desk questions. The Semantic 
Web would also be a bottomless trove of eureka insights. 

Most inventions and scientific breakthroughs, including today's 
Web, spring from novel combinations of existing knowledge. The 
Semantic Web would make it possible to evaluate more 
combinations overnight than a person could juggle in a lifetime. 

"A lot of scientific research is now interdisciplinary, like global 
climate change, and the scientists need to talk to each other," says 
Chaitanya Baru, a data-mining expert at the San Diego 
Supercomputer Center. "But they use different jargon."  

Sure, scientists and other people can post ideas on the Web today 
for others to read. But with machines doing the reading and 
translating jargon terms, related ideas from millions of Web pages 
could be distilled and summarized. That will lift the ability to assess 
and integrate information to new heights.  

As a result, Berners-Lee envisions a new age of enlightenment. 
The Semantic Web, he predicts, "will help more people become 
more intuitive as well as more analytical. It will foster global 
collaborations among people with diverse cultural perspectives, so 
we have a better chance of finding the right solutions to the really 
big issues--like the environment and climate warming." In short, it 
will change the world even more than his original creation.  

The capital-Q question is: Can he pull it off? There's no shortage 
of doubters. Still, most people who know the reclusive Berners-Lee 
are optimistic. "Tim has a gift for seeing the future and making it 
happen," says John R. Patrick, a retired IBM senior exec who 
helped found the W3C. 

Eric E. Schmidt, formerly of Sun and now chairman of search-
engine innovator Google Inc., says Berners-Lee would be a shoo-
in for a Nobel prize--if Nobels were given in computer science. And 
Larry L. Smarr, director of the California Institute of 
Telecommunications & Information Technology at the University of 
California at San Diego, predicts the Semantic Web will cast 
Berners-Lee as "an historic-level figure."  

What impresses those elder statesmen of computing is Berners-
Lee's leadership track record. For a somewhat shy software nerd, 
he has demonstrated a surprising flair for diplomacy, combined 
with bulldog tenacity. 

In the midst of the dot-com bust two years ago, Berners-Lee 
persuaded the W3C's hard-nosed denizens of commerce to begin 
developing the Semantic Web. And before that, in 1998, he 
persuaded them to approve extensible markup language (XML), an 
important new Web lingo. "Tim did a great job shepherding XML 
through the W3C," notes Smarr.  

Indeed, the evolution of XML may be a useful foretaste of what's in 
store for the Berners-Lee's new vision. In the late 1990s, this 
language was constructed to help computers identify different 
types of data on the Web. "When we started work on XML, it was 
considered pretty esoteric," recalls Sutor of IBM. "But now it's the 
underpinnings of everything we're doing in e-business." 

Ditto for hundreds of others, including the 300 companies already 
using XML software from Open Applications Group Inc. OAGI 
predicts that number will double this year.  

Berners-Lee worked tirelessly to win support for XML because it's 
a quantum leap beyond today's witless hypertext markup language 
(HTML)--and it's the cornerstone of the Semantic Web. 

HTML is the language that Berners-Lee concocted while on a 
fellowship as a database engineer at the European Organization 
for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. But the language merely 
specifies the appearance of a Web page: what colors go where, 
which type sizes to use, and where to put graphic elements. 

To a Web browser, or most other computer programs, these words 
and numbers are just squiggles of gibberish. Without some kind of 
clue, computers parsing a Web page can't determine if "buy" is a 
noun or a verb, or whether "20031" is a Zip Code, a price, or the 
number of orders placed last month.  

In contrast, XML tags imbue the Web with meaning. Examples 
might be labels for medical records. The "name" tag would have 
links to relevant sections of online literature, also coded with XML, 
and "interaction" would point to other drugs that interfere with the 
medication. Then, when a doctor bats out a prescription on a 
computer, a software agent could verify that the drug is 
appropriate for the diagnosis, check the patient's records to see 
what other medicines the person is taking, and determine whether 
any of them is likely to interfere with the new prescription. A group 
of university and industrial researchers is already working on such 
a scheme with the Veterans Administration and the National 
Library of Medicine.  

Today, Berners-Lee presides over a research octopus whose 
tentacles extend to all five continents. The 60 staffers at W3C 
headquarters coordinate the efforts of hundreds of researchers at 
50 university and government laboratories that are W3C members, 
plus two-score additional universities around the world. 

For now, most of the actual work on the Semantic Web is being 
done by academics because, Berners-Lee quips, "only a few 
industry people have been given a little leeway to go off and 
explore my crazy ideas."  

XML is a start--but only the tip of the iceberg. XML tags are 
essentially just labels that point to a definition in a combination 
dictionary and thesaurus. That's how a software agent can 
determine that two different tags actually mean the same thing. 
When an agent needs further details, there's an online 
encyclopedia, called an ontology. It lays out the logical rules and 
relationships among XML terms.  

Merging these elements is where semantics gets sticky. Because 
we humans assimilate language gradually, we end up unaware of 
how complicated things are--until we try to construct a new digital 
grammar from scratch, with numerous dialects for various 
industries. 

Devising software that can comprehend words, concepts, and 
relationships has long been a major hangup in artificial intelligence 
(AI) research. Adding a pervasive layer of standardization will test 
the limits of human ingenuity--and patience.  

In the fast-paced Internet Age, the time needed to build consensus 
on the smallest of these details could be the Semantic Web's chief 
obstacle, says MCI's Cerf. He worries that standards could "fall 
victim to business maneuvering" by the W3C's corporate members. 
The result might end up similar to today's systems for electronic 
data interchange (EDI)--with a lot of proprietary systems, each with 
its own lingo. 

On the other hand, partly because the industry is acutely aware of 
EDI's problems and limitations, executives are optimistic. "It'll be a 
chicken-or-egg situation until a killer app comes along--but I'm very 
confident that that will happen," says W. Daniel Hillis, a 
supercomputer pioneer who now heads startup Applied Minds Inc.  

Some academics are enthusiastic about the corporate involvement 
that Berners-Lee has attracted. James A. Hendler, a computer 
scientist at the University of Maryland, says he has worked on AI 
for 20 years and "it has been almost impossible to get the attention 
of business." But now, he says, "the advances we made in the 
1990s are being readied for actual use with the Semantic Web, out 
there in the real world."  

One other factor could give Berners-Lee's vision an enormous 
boost: The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects 
Agency (DARPA) is pushing it. This is the outfit that created the 
guts of the Internet three decades ago. In 1998, it launched the 
DARPA Agent MarkUp Language (DAML) program--initially 
managed by Hendler, who took a leave of absence from Maryland. 
DARPA is now a W3C member, and DAML is being developed in 
concert with XML.  

DARPA wants to develop agent-based systems for command-and-
control jobs in joint military operations, whether they be 
multiservice or multinational. For example, an international team of 
16 organizations--led by a spin-off of Britain's Defense Ministry 
called QinetiQ Ltd.--is working on a "coalition of agents" project. 
With DAML tags pointing to online databases, plus access to 
satellite reconnaissance images, the agents would be aware of the 
capabilities and locations of the many different weapons and 
logistics systems deployed to such spots as Afghanistan. So they 
could provide commanders with instant advice for coping with 
shifting conditions.  

DARPA is also funding research at MIT, headed by Berners-Lee 
but separate from the W3C, aimed at creating new AI tools for 
tomorrow's Web. One result would be Semantic Web logic 
language (Swell). Another goal is to marry the Semantic Web with 
MIT's Oxygen project, which aims to make various digital systems 
as easy to use as breathing, thanks to advanced machine-learning 
tricks and new AI software. 

Cailliau, Berners-Lee's former boss at CERN, figures the Web's inventor 
relishes this research. "I think Tim does not really like the role" of leading a 
big outfit like the W3C, says Cailliau. "He is more comfortable with a small 
team and joining in the fun of writing actual code."  

Berners-Lee admits that building consensus among the W3C's members 
can be trying at times. But someone needs to keep development of the 
Semantic Web on course toward enriching the world--and nobody is better 
qualified than Tim.  


Copyright 2002 The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.






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