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

2. 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]

3. 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..

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

5. 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