SCN: Semantic web

[Doug Schuler]

I met one of the main people behind this effort last November in Kyoto.  
My question to him: People have been working with semantic nets for 20
years without gaining any particular value out of that approach -- why did
he think that moving it to the web would do it?  He thought that making
the conceptual underpinnings available to all might make the payoff
*emerge* -- and he might be right.  The effort was quite heavily funded by
military R&D and corporations.  I'm not sure what their vision is vs.,
say, what an SCN type vision is. (PS. for my more *political* view of a
"world brain" see http://www.infosoc.co.uk/current/Featurearticle4.2.pdf.)

-- Doug

   ******************************************************************
   *     SHAPING THE NETWORK SOCIETY                                *
   *          Patterns for Participation, Action, and Change        *
   *                  http://www.cpsr.org/conferences/diac02        *
   * Tomorrow's information and communication infrastructure        *
   *   is being shaped today.                                       *
   *                              But by whom and to what ends?     *
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On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, Steve wrote:

> 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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