Google recently announced that it was altering the way its search engines interpret words entered by surfers, further highlighting the importance of semantics - the study of meaning in communication – to the Internet.

Tim Berners-Lee, the man many credit with creating the World Wide Web, spoke recently about his vision for the ‘Semantic Web’, an ongoing project piloted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), where he is a director.

The concept of the Semantic Web is the create an environment where the Internet can intelligently interpret what people are searching for online and also enable users to access what data is held by third parties about them. Berners-Lee says that W3C is ensuring that the Semantic Web will respect the privacy of online communications.

In 1999, Berners-Lee described his vision for the Semantic Web thus: “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analysing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines.”

NMK tapped up a few Internet experts to gauge their views to see how realistic the Semantic Web is and how the W3C can address widely-held privacy concerns.

Growing Pains

John Davies leads the next generation Web research group at BT, and he believes that the Semantic Web is beginning to find applications. Davies says that Microsoft’s acquisition of search engine firm Powerset, Yahoo!’s launch of its own semantic search initiative Search Monkey, which is apparently improving click-through rates, and Google’s own developments as evidence of the growth in semantics.

“One common objection to Semantic Web technology is that no-one will ever create the required metadata,” Davies told NMK. “However, Reuters recently launched its OpenCalais service which firstly makes available all of its own business information with semantic mark-up and secondly allows others to use the service on their own content. Furthermore, in some sectors - such as healthcare and life sciences - sophisticated ontologies already exist.”

The enterprise space is already using semantic technology in information integration to improve efficiency. Davies says that BT’s own unification of sales and billing databases in one department has led to £2 million annual savings and he sees ongoing innovation in this sector.
“In parallel with this activity by end-user organisations, we can observe increasing activity in the venture capital sector with many new start-ups in this area,” he said. “In the area of semantic search, there are companies such as Hakia, Powerset, Siderean and Ontotext; in the information and process integration space there are, for example, Metatomix and Ontoprise, while Radar Networks recently announced its Twine semantic social networks offering.”

Above: John Davies

Language Barrier

Linguistic expert Professor David Crystal OBE believes that while the Semantic Web is considered as an evolution of the current Internet the key difference is that the Internet is human-readable, whereas the Semantic Web will be machine-readable. He believes the Semantic Web fails to address a number of areas, including ever evolving language and the different meaning of words across various cultures.

“We need to work with real languages, as well as formal languages. While work in formal semantics has made great progress in the last couple of decades, it is still a generation away from handling the properties of the Web,” Crystal believes.

In Context

The Semantic Web promises as much as the Internet did when it first started to gain mainstream popularity - information freely and easily available to all. This is the view of Mike Wheatley, CEO of Ensembli, a recently-launched personalised news aggregator.

“The challenges are large, for they're the challenges of language, knowledge and ambiguity resolved through context; things which the majority of humans manage effortlessly and often unknowingly, yet which computers are notoriously bad at handling. Witness the whole field of Artificial Intelligence,” he told NMK.

“Despite the security and privacy issues that the Semantic Web brings by replacing often deliberate or necessary obfuscation with clarity and meaning, the benefits are enormous,” Wheatley adds. “Imagine browsing all types of content with the benefit of context, or following links and connections forged through meaning and language rather than HTML, or finding relevant content simply by following a train of thought rather than having to filter it out from tons of irrelevant and useless information. It's what the Internet promised us in the first place.”

Anarchic Future

The current Internet is a “technicolor chaos”, in the view of Chris Gledhill, the managing director of software and services firm PDMS Limited. The Semantic Web offers the chance to agree and stick to pre-defined ontologies, which he fears is beyond the powers of even the most technical wizards.

“The Semantic Web should be welcomed in any commercial field where the economic advantages of standardisation outweigh the benefits of confusing the opposition, punter or regulator,” Gledhill argued. “In other words, just like the real world, there will be many versions of the truth which will sit along side, rather than replace, the creative anarchy of the web as we know it now."

Ensembli’s Wheatley concludes: “No-one can argue cogently that the Internet has reached its peak of development; the next major step must surely be some form of semantic web that makes the finding of useful content simple, easy and intuitive.”