The Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is the next stage of the Web, as its founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee saw it.
The Semantic Web Vision
Let’s take a look at his vision, outlined in his book Weaving the Web, in 2000:
I have a dream for the Web … and it has two parts.
In the first part, the Web becomes a much more powerful means for collaboration between people.
[…]
In the second part of the dream, collaborations extend to computers. Machines 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.
And that, conceptually is really what the Semantic Web is all about. It is what the Web of Data it about.
Information retrieval (or more precisely automatization of information retrieval) is only one of the three general aspects the Founder of the Web saw as purposes that the Semantic Web will serve.
- AUTOMATIZATION OF INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
- INTERNET OF THINGS
- PERSONAL ASSISTANT
J. Hendler posted an archival note about the fisrt draft of this seminal article on Twitter, reading: “since it came up in a thread – thought people might enjoy this — the original outline for the #semanticweb article that
@oralassila @timberners_lee
and I sent to
@sciam
in 2001. Tweet available here: https://twitter.com/jahendler/status/1617911302365519874
Building technologies that underpin the Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the international standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standard promotes common data formats on the World Wide Web. The role of the stadndars around semantic Web technologies is to enable people to create data stores on the Web, agree upon and build vocabularies, as well as write rules for handling data as Linked data.
The Semantic Web As A Set of Linked Data Design Principles
There are many data sources out there and each source can have its own way of encoding and presenting information. To connect the data and create meaningful networks of information, a set of common design principles is needed.
This is exactly what linked data is: a set of design principles for publishing structured machine-readable data that allow to link it with other data. When the data is open (free to use and distribute), it is called linked open data. cit. Linking data: what does it mean?
The socio-cultural effect and the ripples linking data is poised to create, and is already doing so is presented by Sir Tim Berners Lee in a number of videos, among which:
- Gov 2.0 Expo 2010: Tim Berners-Lee, “Open, Linked Data for a Global Community”
- The Semantic Web of Data Tim Berners-Lee
One of the manifestations of the Semantic Web is the trasnitioning from a web of documents to a web of data. The conceptual trasnitioning is well described in this short video by Manu Sporny:
By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web dominated by unstructured and semi-structured documents into a Web of Data. At its core, the Semantic Web stack builds on the W3C’s Resource Description Framework (RDF).
The Semantic Web and Its Contents
Being a long-time explorer of the Semantic Web as vision and technologically as a layer of the Web, I can’t help but add my point of view here about semantic technologies making the Web a better content (marketing communications) medium.
The connecting thread between a text and the Semantic Web is our need to make sense of the information around us and help our machines help us in the deluge of content.
Be it through searching, consuming, or writing content (please don’t take the word content without a salt of grain of salt, ref. Seeing Enterprise Content as Semantic Capital), we always build countless relationships with the quadrillion words available on the web and the indefinite number of associations in a person’s mind. Another factor is the need for that published piece to be made sense of by a system, humming quietly under, say Google’s search: What is your text about? What is that mention of a huge metal fan or a huge metal fan?
Understood in the light of knowledge representation, any text on the web – be that the digitized version of Homer’s Iliad on the amazing Perseus Digital Library Project, or the newly written web copy with a pizza description – will help our web writing efforts and add another level of breadth to what we publish on the web and how we interact with our audiences.
The Semantic Web As SEO, Content and Context Enabler for Marketing Communication
Technicalities aside, in this diagram I have tried to outline the inevitable intersections of the Semantic Web with fields of practice and knowldge like SEO, Content Strategy and content writing.
The Semantic Web Around the Noosphere
For a longer noo-dive in the Semantic Web , I recommend the following reads:
A New Look at the Semantic Web
W3C Semantic Web Frequently Asked Questions
Explorer’s Guide to the Semantic Web by Thomas B. Passin
Knitting the Semantic Web Edited By Jane Greenberg, Eva Méndez Rodriguez
Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, 2nd Edition by Dean Allemang and James Hendler
Related writing and exploring from my side:
Semantic Web, Relationships and a Piece of Conceptual art
Marketing Communications and the Semantic Web: Theoretical Intersections and Practical Implications
Copywriting for the Semantic Web | Webinar with Teodora Petkova
Surfing the Web Layer of Things, Technology and Thoughts: A Dialogue with Ruben Verborgh
Towards a Semantic Web Ethos [Book Excerpt]
This attempt for defining what the Semantic Web is is part of the Glossary project I work on in order to enrich my upcoming book Being Dialogic with Linked Data.
