Semantics Scales Up: Beyond Search in Web 3.0

Concern for scalability — both in computational terms and in terms of human effort needed to develop semantic models and background knowledge — has hampered the adoption of semantic techniques and the Semantic Web. This concern is misplaced given the extensive progress the past decade has seen on standards, methods, and technologies for developing semantic models or ontologies, semantic annotations, and techniques for semantic integration, analysis, and reasoning. Such progress is complemented by myriad recent success stories that use semantics in broad-based applications such as Web search, as well as in a growing number of vertical domains. As the future of computing expands beyond cyberspace to cyber-physical-social computing, with extensive growth in social and sensor data, semantics will play an even larger and more pervasive role in exploiting larger amounts of increasingly heterogeneous and multimodal data.