Nearly all organizations face challenges in timely acquisition, analysis, and sharing of relevant, accurate information. Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has opened doors to new ways of information sharing and new modes of commerce, yet many common information processing tasks are still difficult, time-consuming and error prone.
Two important terms have gained popular currency in the technology community over the last few years: "Semantic Web" and "ontology". What do these terms mean, and why are they important to modern organizations?
"Sematic Web" is a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and founder of the W3C. The term refers to a vision for information sharing which goes far beyond the simple web document sharing to which we are all now accustomed. In this vision, arbitrarily complex information structures may be shared, linked together, and aggregated into larger structures, either by people or by automated programs. For example, we now have web pages with links. These links have metadata that is useful mainly for browsing. A 'semantic' web page has links as well, but these links have metadata that describes how the link relates to other links.
Why is the ability to manipulate complex information structures important? Well, just as the WWW has already improved our ability to perfom many tasks dependent upon timely information, the new, richer structures of the Semantic Web can be used to dramatically improve our efficiency in performing even larger, more knowledge intensive tasks.
Realizing this vision of the Semantic Web depends on many recent technology advances, each of which is the culmination of work by researchers and programmers in a particular area of computer science. So the ideas here are not really new in an absolute sense, but the maturation of the concepts and the wide availability of tools to manipulate these information structures has only recently brought about new levels of practical capability for a broad set of users. Looking back over the history of technology, we can see that this pattern has repeated many times: a set of independent elements mature to the point where they may be combined to enable a new type of functionality accessible by large numbers of people. We claim that this point is being reached now with the technologies being lumped under the term "Semantic Web".
At LogicU, we view the development of the Semantic Web with great interest. However, it is not the currently most popular Semantic Web applications, such as RSS and FOAF, which interest us most. Rather, we are more enthusiastic about the general impact of ontology mechanisms on modern information management practices, in many ways that are not yet widely recognized.
Of course, there is further reading on the topic. But for now, please continue on to read What is an Ontology?