Tuesday, October 9, 2007

The Semantic Web - revolution of new possibilities

I had problems searching things one the World Wide Web many times. And sometimes I wondered why isn´t the computer smarter or why isn´t there any program that I can use that helps me find the information I need easier. We have these kind of problems because the words we use as hints for our searches don´t have a semantic content to our computers. Computers are not reliable when it comes to meanings.
The Semantic Web would definitely make our searches easier to get. The main characteristic of the World Wide Web it´s is universality and the links are its´ elements. Non-discrimination should also be one of its´ characteristics. Its´aim is the human consumption in the first place and secondly it is a source of databases, programs and sensor output.
For a Semantic Web to work we need the access to structured collections of information and some inference rules that they can use. There is a common knowledge representation system but it needs to work using some rules and codes and even then there are still going to be unanswerable questions. But this doesn´t scare the Semantic Web researchers. What makes the SW different is providing a language that expresses both data and rules and that allows knowledge-representations to be imported on the Web.
Sometimes we don´t get the right meanings of what the others are trying to say. This is why the SW need ontologies, understood as documents that define the relations among terms. These can solve confusions by providing equivalence relations. They also help manipulating the information.
What SW promotes is synergy, accuracy of web searches, flexibility, less time wasted, reliability. The main idea which can make it work is reducing information to get closer to what we are looking for.
Developing a SW is important because it may assist the evolution of human knowledge as a whole, using a unifying language. I hope we will have such a web really soon!

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