Semantic Web: Commercial Opportunities and Prospects John Davies Head of Next Generation Web, BT 17.11.2018

Today’s Web is… A place where computers do the presentation (easy) and people do the linking and interpreting (hard). Why not get computers to do more of the hard work? [Goble 03] 17.11.2018

Semantic Web Today’s web Semantic web vision Machine-to-human – emphasis on presentation Semantic web vision “an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning” (Tim Berners-Lee) making web-based information machine-processable <bold>use bold font</> → <product-code>1234-6/A</> also rules (reasoning; business logic; conflict detection) ontologies provide the domain models for annotation The Web was designed to enable people to access documents stored on computers distributed across the globe. So it was designed for human-to-machine communication, rather than machine-to-machine interworking. Specifically, the free text nature of a web page makes it hard to automatically identify relevant information. HTML, the language of today’s web, specifies the layout of pages, it does not identify the meaning (semantics) of the information on the page. To take a simple example, HTML can specify that a given string should be displayed in bold font but cannot tell you that that string represents a product code. To take a specific example, we may wish to design an intelligent agent system which helps us select a new car, by visiting manufacturers’ web-sites, obtaining data, filtering on the basis of our stated preferences, and making comparisons. We will obviously want to know the price. However, every web-site will have price intermingled in the text in a haphazard way. We may be able to design software which is more-or-less successful in identifying the price information. But even if we can, it will never cope with the cost of extras etc. And other information, e.g. safety information, will be more complex still. In addition, the current web is difficult to search because of the lag of tagging. If we want a document written by John Davies we search for a document with the ‘John Davies’ string. But this may be about John Davies, written for John Davies, or may mention John Davies for any number of other reasons.. 17.11.2018

Application Areas Information Integration & Interoperability Knowledge & Information Management Semantic Web Services Next Generation OSS … 17.11.2018

Agenda Morning Lunchtime Afternoon Suppliers & Users Demos in Lomond Suite (Level 0) Afternoon EU research: results and directions Research projects and their application Independent perspectives from Analyst community Investment Community 17.11.2018