Thinking on the Web: Berners-Lee, Gödel and Turing

THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK

This book is organized into two parts: Part I, What Is Web Intelligence; and Part II, Web Ontology and Logic.

We begin Part I (Web Intelligence) with a presentation on the development of the Information Revolution and how the Web contributes to human productivity. Then in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, we weave the contributions of Gödel (What Is Decidable?), Turing (What Is Machine Intelligence?) and Berners-Lee (What is solvable on the Web?) into a coherent mosaic of intelligent Web capabilities.

In addition, we highlight the more controversial philosophical issues through the use of interludes: a threaded series of vignettes presented between chapters. The point and counterpoint debate on many of the most controversial topics in AI lays bare the essential issues.

Before we can achieve anything approaching artificial intelligence or “thinking” on the Web, the next-generation Web architecture must be able to support the basic elements of logic and automation.

In Part II, we present Web Ontology and Logic: the solution of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to deliver Semantic Web architecture built upon layers of open markup languages. The Semantic Web will support machine-processing capabilities that will automate Web applications and services. Berners-Lee has suggested that Web technologies would benefit from integration of the Semantic Web’s meaningful content with Web Services’ business logic.

For the Semantic Web to provide intelligent features and capabilities, ...