ERCIM News is a quarterly publication from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). The October 2002 issue is dedicated to the Semantic Web. It contains no less than 26 articles which are all available online here.
In "A Few Words about the Semantic Web and its Development in the ERCIM Institutes," Jérôme Euzenat writes:
The idea of the Semantic Web (a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web) involves annotating documents with 'semantic markup', that is, markup that is not interpreted for display but rather as an expression of document content. This is often described as 'a Web for machines' as opposed to a Web to be read by humans. This idea was experimented with on a small scale during the nineties, both by the SHOE system, developed at the University of Maryland, and Ontobroker, developed at the University of Karlsruhe.
The Semantic Web lifts off is written by Tim Berners-Lee, Director of W3C, and by Eric Miller, W3C Semantic Web Activity Leader.
Here is the introduction.
Many researchers at ERCIM Institutes are aware that this is an exciting time to be involved in work done at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Scalable Vector Graphics, Web Services, and the Semantic Web are but a few of the W3C Activities attracting media attention. This article focuses on the W3C's Semantic Web Activity and recent developments in the Semantic Web community. Although it is difficult to predict the impact of such a far-reaching technology, current implementation and signs of adoption are encouraging and developments in future research areas are extremely promising.
After describing all the activities going on at the W3C, the authors become pretty lyrical in their conclusions.
The most exciting thing about the Semantic Web is not what we can imagine doing with it, but what we can't yet imagine it will do. Just as global indexes, and Google's algorithms were not dreamed of in the early Web days, we cannot imagine now all the new research challenges and exciting product areas which will appear once there is a Web of data to explore.
The Semantic Web starts as a simple circles-and-arrows diagram relating things, which slowly expands and coalesces to become global and vast. The Web of human-readable documents spawned a social revolution. The Semantic Web may in turn spawn a revolution in computing. In neither case did a change occur in the power of one person or one computer, but rather a dramatic change in the role they can play in the world, by being able to find out almost anything virtually immediately.
For more information on the Semantic Web, including additional projects, products, efforts and future directions, check out the Semantic Web home page.
Source: Tim Berners-Lee and Eric Miller, ERCIM News No. 51, October 2002
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