The Semantic Web is (quote) "a new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers". It will "unleash a revolution of new possibilities" using a magical "new" artificially intelligent technology called ontology. So says a much-cited article in Scientific American published back in May 2001. Most people who have read this article, fall into two camps: "believers" and "non-believers". Let me tell you a short story about a religious war between these two groups...
The American poet and songwriter Gil Scott-Heron once famously remarked that The Revolution Will Not Be Televised [1]. Science has undergone its own quiet revolution since the invention of the Web back in 1990. This has slowly but surely changed scientific communication, not just a Revolution but a "Webolution" [2] if you like. The recent addition of television to the Web means that, to paraphrase Gil, the Webolution will be televised. You can now watch some of the webolution in science, thanks the likes of JOVE (The Journal Of Visualised Experiments), SciVee.TV, Google Video and YouTube. What are these sites like and is their scientific and technical content any good?
Tim Berners-Lee delivered his one hour keynote at the AAAI'06 conference yesterday on the Semantic Web, after an introduction from Yolanda Gil. Tim gave an impassioned speech covering the last 16 years of the web and discussed the future of sharing data on the web using persistent URI's and W3C standards like RDF and OWL. At the end of it all, there were some searching questions from Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google Labs.
