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Friday, May 26, 2006

Semantic web ready for prime time

Semantic Web emerges from the sidelines at Edinburgh conference, a JISC press release, May 26, 2006. Excerpt:
Speaking in an interview for JISC at the end of the week-long International World Wide Web conference, David De Roure, Professor at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and one of the conference organisers, said it would be remembered for the emergence of the Semantic Web from specialist and academic discussions into the mainstream of public debate.

‘The Semantic Web came through at all levels of debate,’ he said. ‘It’s become very real.’ Acknowledging that the Web community has not in the past been very good at articulating what the Semantic Web actually is, Professor De Roure says that some very good and concise definitions are beginning to emerge....‘The Semantic Web is about the integration of data, enabling data to come together - the data could be calendars, photographs, pictures, scientific data, experimental data - allowing it to be searched and browsed in ways in which it couldn’t be searched and browsed before, enabling those resources to come together, enabling you to ask questions that you couldn’t ask before....The Semantic Web has equal application in chemistry, history, archaeology, music, and any other subject, and it’s as useful for those putting together the learning materials as it is for those doing the learning.’

Also see Jonathan Bennett, Semantic Web ready for mainstream use, News.com, May 24, 2006. Excerpt:

Speaking at the World Wide Web 2006 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Wednesday, Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, said it is now time for Web developers and content producers to start using semantic languages in addition to HTML.

A panel discussion titled "The next wave of the Web" kicked off the second day of the conference and marked the start of the technical conference content. Nigel Shadbolt, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, told the conference attendees that what has been achieved with the Web so far is astounding by itself. "We’ve produced an information infrastructure that few would have anticipated, with the possible exception of Vannevar Bush, but I think even he would have thought the scale of all this extraordinary. Fifty years ago, it might have appeared audacious, perhaps even inconceivable, that we could have built the kind of global infrastructure that now surrounds us," said Shadbolt....

Berners-Lee said that building the stack of technologies needed to make the Semantic Web a reality has taken some time, but that we’re now at the stage where the technologies can be used....The last layer of that cake has recently been finalized. Berners-Lee explained that "the Query language, SPARQL, is now in the candidate recommendation phase, which means it’s time to implement it....