Posted on Friday 25 November 2005 - Popularity: unranked
A podcast (and transcript) of an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. He talks about his vision of “part two” of the web (not to confuse with Web 2.0), called the Semantic Web. For those of you that didn’t follow the semantic web idea, let’s hear what Tim has to say about it:
IOM: So overall, I mean, the whole grand view and vision of the Semantic Web, how long you’ve been working on Semantic Web, and can you give me a brief overview or a brief picture of what the Semantic Web exactly is?
TimBL: Ok, right, brief how long have you got…ok. I’ll try. I’ve been working on Semantic Web since I’ve been working on the web, which is basically since 1989. The idea was the web should be a web for all media and now it’s media in the sense of multimedia it’s media in the sense of information for people Like web pages, like movies, like … sounds so all the things produced by people and absorbed by people. The web has proved to be a space for. But the data out there which actually is also not so exciting perhaps but really important part of our lives, like economic data and data that runs the business is not on the web. So when you go to a website, …and it’s got data behind it in fact cos it’s for example the weather website. And you’ve got somebody wants to use it you’re the sort of person that uses a computer, uses data on the computer, say you use it for a spreadsheet and you can’t at the moment pull that data up into your spreadsheet. So the Semantic Web is about making that possible, but really is just completing the web vision. So we’ve been working on it for long time, and it just we ended up getting distracted by the others things that seemed more important at the time like multimedia.
IOM: OK. So, this is part two…to be continued.
TimBL: If you like.
Personally I still get the impression that this whole “part two” of the web just takes way too long. As soon as they’ve agreed on the technology driving it and all the standards needed to define the semantic web, companies like Google will already have built systems (Google Base for example) that give you similar results, but with the difference that by than, those services already have the critical amount of users and data to be a success.
