March 23, 2007 12:13 PM
Open market for consumer - Web 3.0
Semantic web is about converting human-readable information into machine readable information. To allow crawlers to go upto the physical location of the information: the data semantics must be accessible, the internal representation of this data on the company server is immaterial. e.g. 'Kbps' is BitRate; this information is expressed on the web with reference to a unique URI: www.commondefinitions.org/#kbps in the metadata for 'BitRate'. In the company database this information may be represented as: Kbps=1, Mbps=2, etc (BitRate enumeration).
What will be achieved with semantic web: consider one application " open market", this is what we will discuss here. Here I am not referring to the e-commerce company 'Open Market' that was acquired by FatWire Software and Soverain Software. I want to discuss the concept of 'open market' where the consumer has access to information and is free to make decisions without any external influence. To be able to provide an open market on the WWW, it is necessary that every web content provider understands the same language and has an open door. By 'open door' I would mean that the web content provider allows access to the information.
The issues to be addressed are :
- Common Language – understood by the Web Content Provider, Search Engine and Browser.
- Schema – that will provide methods to arrange the information systematically.
- Security – web content providers concern about information security and market competition.
- Transition – cost involved.
- Advantage – what is the gain for the web content provider.
- ...
The first three issues are to be addressed by the technology. There is an obvious advantage for the consumer, the ripple will lead to the fourth and fifth. Technology will provide fourth and fifth.
In a market everything is a 'thing'. The 'thing' has characteristics that have deterministic value and are comparable. On the World Wide Web this 'thing' is a resource that has a unique identity Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The 'thing' is not physically retrievable as "holding a thing in hand", but it is like getting information "about a thing".
In Web 2.0, URI was assigned to a web document that was considered a 'thing'. XML entities (elements, attributes, child elements) were not considered as web resources and hence unique URI was not assigned to them. An ISP services web page was a 'thing' but the packages offered by the ISP were not a 'thing', therefore external access to ISP packages was limited to the XML document.
In Web 3.0, it is envisioned that these entities will be considered as a 'thing', thus assigning unique URI to a 'thing', this 'thing' will have properties with deterministic values. The properties of a 'thing' are also assigned a URI, this URI web page may provide information about this property: description, possible values etc. The value of this property may be another URI or a literal value. Hence everything is considered as a Web resource in Web 3.0. The advantage is that the same property and value URI can be used by several web-sites. Hence data drawn from diverse sources can be integrated and combined.
RDF specifications generalize the concept of "Web resource" as: "information about things that can be identified on the Web, even when they cannot be directly retrieved on the Web". Information that was earlier displayed will now be available for processing. Thus RDF provides language to relate data to real world objects.
I am going to be blogging live from a couple of days of the 
1 Comments
I would like one additional requirement for symantic integration - translation and transformation capabilities. I just don't think we'll EVER get everyone using the same schema, and it we did it would mean throwing out everything we already have. I've been watching the ontology standards including FDF, but OWL is considered the more robust and newer standard. Oasis is also working on industry specific ontologies.
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