From Here to There

In a previous paper, the author described where he thought the Web would be headed over the next few years. He speculated that the trend seemed to be toward the semantic Web, although maybe not via the shortest path of directly deploying semantic Web technologies such as RDF and OWL. For this paper, he presents some concrete examples of technologies that support this prognosis. One key idea of the semantic Web is the Web of data, in which richly interconnected data collections appear alongside (and integrated with) the collections of hypertext documents. However, the Web supports linking, and with the various data languages available (often XML based), a Web of data without semantic Web technologies is entirely conceivable. In a sense, we already have such a thing, although the data are usually binary files such as images and audio files, which seriously limits linking potential. Without the ability to join pieces of information and work more on the level of knowledge representation, this naive Web of data offers little promise in itself. There is a possible shift under way, however, from the Web as (mostly) a document repository with generally limited granularity of addressability, to the Web as a generic, moderately interlinked data store (which includes documents as a subset of data types)