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Patterns of Change The Semantic Web The rapid expansion of the World Wide Web is outpacing our ability to make sense of the information that we're putting on it. The Web is becoming a tower of Babel: a morass of undifferentiated, unnavigable data that requires inordinate effort from users to extract meaning or utility. Tools such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the resource description framework (RDF) provide mechanisms for establishing shared meaning across disparate databases and applications, but only in limited domains. Tim Berners-Lee, the developer of the original Web information architecture, has a proposal to deal with the problem. He calls his vision the Semantic Web. By attaching machine-readable code to the information we put on the Web, he hopes to harness the power of the computer to sort, differentiate, manipulate, and transform the information. Digital signatures will provide the means to filter content for quality automatically. Publicly available deductive programs will allow the Web to manipulate and transform the data on behalf of users. The Semantic Web will be a more meaningful place than the current Web to conduct business, communicate, learn, and play. Page 2. Items Worth Noting Powering the Network Economy While no one was watching, the network economy has spawned some major users of electric power. Internet server farms in Silicon Valley consume as much electricity as several steel mills. Page 5. Continuous Partial Attention Microsoft Corp. researcher Linda Stone has coined the phrase continuous partial attention to describe the state of mind in which a growing number of businesspeople function—particularly those who adopt the latest high-tech gadgets. Page 6. Self-Organizing Web Sites In what amounts to a new publishing model, some Web sites post all submitted articles for readers to rate, tally the results, and allow the popular articles to rise to prominence while the unpopular articles fade into oblivion. Page 7. |
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