| Web 3.0 - What's Next? - the Semantic Web |
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| Written by the Cyberspace Pursuit Team | ||||||||||
Page 2 of 8 The Semantic WebThe Semantic Web could be defined as a web governed by machines, maintained by machines, and even contributed to by machines- a web that understands itself. A Semantic Web would not only be able to reassemble bits of content on-the-fly for custom tailored webpages (like "Web 2.0"), but it could do so intelligently. This would improve search results and page relevancy, making the now mainly-human job of sorting through search results obsolete. Today's webpages are created by people for people, which in itself provides an obstacle to this "Conscious Web". How can machines truly understand web content if it is only written for human eyes? As the Semantic Web is a prospective topic, its mechanisms are even more so. Following are two views that split our team.
New Web StandardsNew Web StandardsOne of the most dominant ideas of the Semantic Web, requires the use of newer web standards and markupWhen content is added to a web page, its designer must first "mark it up" using a mark-up language such as HTML (HyperText Markup Language). This constitutes placing bits of information into "tags". Tags are pieces of code which surround content and provide browsers with information about that content. . Most current web markup standards only tell browsers how to display information; they tell browsers little to nothing about the content itself. (More)The most used markup language in the world, HTML, is limiting in its inability to categorize content. HTML only separates content into standard tags which usually have little relevance to the content (e.g. list-item, bold, and blockquotes). HTML does, however, have a few ways around this. The "meta" tag is designed specifically to declare content-type and other metadata (information about content like creation date, tags, and author). Tags can also have attributes known as "classes"- groups in which tags can be placed that, technically, should only define the display of tags they contain. This system has been adapted in some cases to define a tag's content type by changing the classes name to a relevant keyword. However, some newer languages such as RDFResource Description Framework Criticism: This method does, however, have its drawbacks. Mainly, the transfer over to such systems would require much more work than many webmasters are willing to give, and, as the web contains well over 1 trillion pages, the amount of work required to do this by hand is inconceivable. Artificial IntelligenceImproved Artificial IntelligenceAnother mainstream idea is the future development of more advanced- if not true- artificial intelligence.This would cut out all of the work required to transfer webpages over to new system and make the web much more intuitive and easier with which to work. Criticism: This idea has drawn on a very large amount of criticism. Firstly, we don't have the kind of technology required to create true artificial intelligence; our closest attempts to date consist mainly of intelligence faking. Secondly, the morals behind such a system must be worked out, both politically and socially (as Hollywood loves to remind use nearly once a year). From the Man HimselfFrom the Man HimselfBelow is a quite well-known quote from Tim Berners-Lee I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing 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. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
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