SemanticWebIntro

(page from Andrea Fiore?)

During the last ten years the web is grown whit an impressing and exponential rhythm. New social and economical actors have joined the initial groups of scientists, academics and technicians that created the new medium and started to shape his form and his uses. Nowadays the web is used to publish, collect and browse information, share knowledge, but even deliver material and immaterial products and services. At the moment when this Page is written the most used search engines google index more than 8 Billinos web pages.

An every day growing portion of this pages is generated by database-driven web applications like Content Management Systems and Weblog engines that serve different kind of content according to different criteria. Most of this web applications already offer options to sort, search and filter content and implement features like authentication and permission based accesses inside their technical form. Even if the web has many uses his content is still mostly encoded as html pages. Html provides us a platform independent way to to write Hypertextual documents readable by humans, but does not provide any formal and machine understandable description of the meaning of this Content. Morover, even if HTML allows the Hyperlinking with other documents or with subsections of documents it does not provide informations about the meaning and the specific kind of relations rappresented by this links.

The 'semantic web' is a project presided by the W3C and devoted to bring structure to the meaningful content of Web page. This effort involves Technicians and academics, but even big industrial and commercial actors in the creation of new formal languages, often addressed to describe specific kind of Data and relations.

At the doctor's office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through her handheld Web browser. The agent promptly retrieved information about Mom's prescribed treatment from the doctor's agent, looked up several lists of providers, and checked for the ones in-plan for Mom's insurance within a 20-mile radius of her home and with a rating of excellent or very good on trusted rating services. It then began trying to find a match between available appointment times (supplied by the agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete's and Lucy's busy schedules. (The emphasized keywords indicate terms whose semantics, or meaning, were defined for the agent through the Semantic Web.)

In a few minutes the agent presented them with a plan. Pete didn't like it—University Hospital was all the way across town from Mom's place, and he'd be driving back in the middle of rush hour. He set his own agent to redo the search with stricter preferences about location and time. Lucy's agent, having complete trust in Pete's agent in the context of the present task, automatically assisted by supplying access certificates and shortcuts to the data it had already sorted through.Almost instantly the new plan was presented: a much closer clinic and earlier times—but there were two warning notes. First, Pete would have to reschedule a couple of his less important appointments. He checked what they were—not a problem. The other was something about the insurance company's list failing to include this provider under physical therapists: "Service type and insurance plan status securely verified by other means," the agent reassured him.

Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web , Scientific American, May 2001