Chapter 10. The Semantic Web: A Cocktail Discussion
While the previous chapters attempted to provide an overview of the social web and motivate you to get busy hacking on data, it seems appropriate to wrap up with a brief postscript on the semantic web. This short discussion makes no attempt to regurgitate the reams of interesting mailing list discussions, blog posts, and other sources of information that document the origin of the Web, how it has revolutionized just about everything in our lives in under two decades, and how the semantic web has always been a part of that vision. It does, however, aim to engage you in something akin to a cocktail discussion that, while glossing over a lot of the breadth and depth of these issues, hopefully excites you about the possibilities that lie ahead.
An Evolutionary Revolution?
Letâs start out by dissecting the term âsemantic web.â Given that the Web is all about sharing information and that a working definition of semantics is âenough meaning to result in an action,â[62] itâs not a very big leap to deduce that the semantic web is mostly about representing knowledge in a very meaningful way. But letâs take that one step further and not assume that itâs a human who is consuming the information thatâs represented. Letâs consider the possibilities that could be realized if information were shared in a fully machine-understandable wayâa way that is unambiguous enough that a reasonably sophisticated user agent like a web ...
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