Thursday, December 05, 2002

Tim Berners-Lee Reports on the Semantic Web This highly condensed article reports on current developments related to the semantic web. I've learned to pay attention to anything that Berners-Lee says about Internet developments. I vividly remember the transformation in faculty and student use of the Internet that occurred in the early 90's when the Internet became the Web. (Remember the transition from Lynxes and Gophers to a Web Mosaic!) Berners-Lee and his co-author Eric Miller introduce the semantic web with this question in the third paragraph, "How might this be useful? Suppose you want to compare the price and choice of flower bulbs that grow best in your zip code, or you want to search online catalogs from different manufactures for equivalent replacement parts for a Volvo 740. The raw information that may answer these questions, may indeed be on the Web, but it's not in a machine-usable form. You still need a person to discern the meaning of the information and its relevance to your needs." Now, instead of flower bulbs or Volvo parts, think of searching for particular online learning resources in your special field of interest. A person is definitely needed to assist with searches across learning repositories (that's what EduResources is about). The semantic web undertaking will have a critical impact on the findability and usability of online learning resources. As more and more learning resources are made available it will be essential that machine searches become more functional in their ability to precisely and selectively locate sought-after resources. It's not too hard for a person to identify and evaluate 50 resources; it's very difficult to locate and sift 50,000 or 500,000 or 5,000,000 resources. 10:02:19 AM    COMMENT []