Semantic web: promises and challenges

Abstract

Semantic Web is all about web of data, about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. Semantic Web derives from W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange - a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web. His view of the Semantic Web is of a data bus - connect everything and put the data in the same media, which users can use to query, explore, visualize or graph. Semantic Web brings in to the World Wide Web, the capability of representing information in a format that can be read and used by software agents, facilitating data integration. It has partly evolved finding its place in various social networking/information sharing sites likedel.icio.us, Flickr.com, dig.com etc., in the public domain - involving a lot of loose and ambiguous terminology to spread across, namely Web 2.0, Web 3.0 etc, and partly as some use cases and applications in the enterprise world. As part of this project, we attempted to Understand what Semantic Web is, how it works, why and how it is different from than that is on offer today, and the potential that it hold so Understand how the various enterprises and other establishments are looking at the idea of Semantic Web, Identify challenges confronting the adoption of Semantic Web, possible shortcomings and factors that could determine the success of Semantic Web. From our analysis,? We find that Semantic Web has come a long way since the concept was initially proposed by Tim Berners-Lee almost about a decade ago. We now have W3C proposed standards in place for the critical pieces of the architecture; we have an increasing number of tools that facilitate easier means of semantic data representation? We find that there is an increasing number of adoptions in organizations involved in life sciences, drug development, and enterprises in the public domain. We understand that Semantic Web, has its share of challenges, which is inhibiting its rapid adoption We also realize that Semantic Web and Web 2.0 complement each other. Both of them can leverage from each others strengths. We conclude by suggesting that Semantic Web is going to require sustained, uncompromising efforts from W3C, the community, technologists, developer community, enterprises, and others, to make the dream of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's, a reality.