The latest issue (72) of ERCIM News features a keynote address about the future web by Timothy Berners-Lee. ____JH
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"The power of the Web hadn't reached its full potential until the semantic Web came along. The semantic Web's realization is, "It isn't the documents which are actually interesting, it is the things they are about!' A person who is interested in a Web page on something is usually primarily interested in the thing rather than the document. There are exceptions, of course – documents are certainly interesting in their own right. However, when it comes to the business and science, the customers, the products, or the proteins and the genes, are the things of interest. A good semantic Web browser, then, shows a user information about the thing, which may have been merged from many sources. Primarily, the user is aware of the abstract Web of connections between the things – eg: this person is a customer who made this order which includes this item which is manufactured by this facility ... and so on."
"The Web of things is built on the Web of documents, which is built on the Web of computers controlled by DNS owners, which itself is build on a set of interconnected cables. This is an architecture which provides a social backing to the names for things. It allows people to find out the social aspects of the things they are dealing with, such as provenance, trust, persistence, licensing and appropriate use as well as the raw data. It allows people to figure out what has gone wrong when things don't work, by making the responsibility clear. The last level of abstraction is the Web of real things, built on top of the Web of documents, which is in turn built on the network of computers."
10:40:22 AM 
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