RDF, metadata, and the semantic web

Imagine for a little bit all the xml languages and examples we’ve seen throughout this course. We’ve seen little languages that represent books, journals, and authors. We’ve seen examples of xml languages for recipes. We’ve talked about real life examples like mathml and docbook.

How do any of these relate to the web? Some of you in your projects have proposed converting one special type of markup of your own creation into html. Where does that information go? When we convert xml into markup, have we lost information? If we think about html as a display format (i.e. for human eyes only) this might not be so bad. But remember, machines are reading html, too. When you share a link on facebook, a machine reads that page to generate a preview. When you look at previews of webpages in google search results, those are snippets of html that have been parsed by googles servers. Html is rarely for human consumption only. Machines read it all the time.

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web”, which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize. – Tim Berners-Lee

schema-ish stuff

xml

Non-xml

Applications

Querying

Logic Programming

Criticism