Semantic Web: Leslie Walker at Washington Post interviewed Tim Berners-Lee about the Semantic Web.
"He sketched a scenario in which 350 people fell ill with a mysterious disease. Tapping into the Semantic Web, a scientist hunts for clues to its origin. "Is it an allergy? Is it something in the atmosphere? Is it a virus? We don't know, but you want to correlate about everything you've got," Berners-Lee theorized.
In his futuristic scenario, the Semantic Web offers controlled access to American health care data, plus databases charting the location and status of rivers, underground water, forests and local vegetation, along with economic data on local industries and what they produce -- all marked up in special vocabularies. Those allow scientists to run global queries across the Web, fishing randomly for correlations that might exist between where the sick people lived, worked and played -- such as a polluted stream or industrial dump. Even more fanciful, Berners-Lee described all sorts of analytical tools the scientist could use, tools that might replace our aging Web browsers, letting us display data by color codes, by geographic maps or by types of sources searched. "
The man has vision. But the corporate world is not buying it. They talk about web services instead - much more limited applications.
The Lord Of the Webs by Leslie Walker, Washington Post (Jan 30, 2003)
Posted by Gwen at January 30, 2003 11:58 AM