The Semantic Web: An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee VISION: What new capabilities will the Semantic Web have? STATUS: Who is committed and how do we get the rest on board? CRITICS: What works and what has not proceeded well? BUSINESS REALITY: What are the biggest challenges? INFRASTRUCTURE: What other standards are needed? USERS: What will it be like to use the Semantic Web? Retrieved 9/12/2008

The Semantic Web: An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee VISION: What new capabilities will the Semantic Web have? Goal – Create a universal medium for the exchange of data where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. Automated tools – aka “Software Agents”.

The Semantic Web: An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee STATUS: Who is committed and how do we get the rest on board? More applications – authoring tools, database technologies, and enterprise-level applications – are using the initial W 3 C standards for description (RDF) and ontologies (OWL). RDF - Resource Description Framework: A language for describing resources. Ontologies: Computer-usable definitions of basic concepts in a domain and the relationships among them. OWL - Web Ontology Language: Knowledge representation.

The Semantic Web: An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee CRITICS: What works and what has not proceeded well? “The Semantic Web doesn’t do anything for me I can’t do with XML”. XML does not facilitate integration of data across large expanses of an organization. For that, one needs RDF.

The Semantic Web: An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee BUSINESS REALITY: What are the biggest challenges? We’ve seen significant interest and uptake in the Life Sciences community … and have seen successful Semantic Web Projects at the National Cancer Institute, as one example.

The Semantic Web: An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee INFRASTRUCTURE: What other standards are needed? There are dozens of organizations … who are interested in developing their own ontologies, just as there continues to be a demand for industry-specific XML vocabularies.

The Semantic Web: An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee USERS: What will it be like to use the Semantic Web? Berners-Lee gives a rather unimpressive example: If one is attending a meeting, or booking a reservation, one could simply ‘save’ this information and drag this into a calendaring application rather than the tedious effort of cutting and pasting. A more interesting example might be: You receive a last-minute assignment to travel to San Francisco. Your software agent makes reservations to suit your preferences for air, car and hotel. It informs you of conflicts in your schedule, requests permission to proceed, updates your calendar and your boss’ calendar. The agent uses your credit card information to confirm reservations, provide boarding passes, and print out your itinerary..

What Metadata Might a Semantic Web Page Contain NOT EASILY MACHINE READABLE USING HTML: Physiotherapy Centre Welcome … Consultation hours Mon 11 am – 7 pm Wed 3 pm – 7 pm Fri 11 am – 3 pm Adapted from: Antoniou, G. and van Harmelen, F. (2004). A Semantic Web Primer. Cambridge: MIT Press.

What Metadata Might a Semantic Web Page Contain MACHINE READABLE USING EXPLICIT METADATA (XML) : Special Therapies, Inc. Physiotherapy Physiotherapy Centre Lisa Davenport Steve Matthews Mon 11 am – 7 pm Wed 3 pm – 7 pm