When information becomes knowledge

IDEA N^o 100

THE SEMANTIC WEB

The dream of intelligent machines has been around almost as long as machines themselves. This dream is now becoming a reality. It is called the Semantic Web.

The term was coined by the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee: ‘I have a dream for the Web … in which computers … become capable of analysing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web”, which makes 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.’

On the Semantic Web, all information exists in a format that software applications can investigate and understand. Information is automatically processed and turned into knowledge.

Knowledge is information in context. Just as today’s Web marks up information so that it can be displayed, searched and indexed, the Semantic Web marks up information describing its context. By applying context to large volumes of information, new connections occur, and unexpected discoveries are made.

When information is marked up with contextual data, the information becomes more valuable. It becomes knowledge. On the Semantic Web this knowledge travels with the data. When you access a piece of information you also access the context for understanding it. Data from disparate sources is automatically merged. Vast new data sources are created from which new understanding can arise. Unstructured data becomes structured. The World Wide Web becomes a global database of knowledge.

This may sound far-fetched, but it is already happening in small pockets across the Web. Take Facebook. People and applications interact to create an ever-smarter pool of knowledge. It is learning and interpreting our behaviour. Facebook is thinking. The same is true of Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Twitter and many other websites. But as in the physical world, this knowledge is locked away in silos. By sharing this intelligence across an open network, we could take a giant step closer to realizing the Semantic Web. A Web that thinks.

A Web that thinks, a World Wide Mind, is a crazy thought. But when every piece of information in the world is linked and described, it is a logical next step. This future is not too far away. And it is not dissimilar to the vision a Belgian bibliophile had in 1935 (see The Mundaneum).■

‘Information with contextual data becomes more valuable.’

HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a sentient computer that can think for itself.