W3C Semantic Web: future or another standard?
“The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.”
Andrew Tannenbaum
preamble
Web 2.0 became a buzz word nowadays and many people has different understanding of it.
It seems we can just use World Wide Web consortium(W3C) [http://www.w3c.org] and find final definition,
but there is no any standard definition. We have many different definitions from different companies or people.
Let’s make short sum-up:
Web2.0 is a architecture of interconnectivity and social interactions on the Web.
With such architecture we can create web-sites where users can produce content of his network using distributed content of other networks or independent developers.
Common mis-association here is that AJAX[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX] is a main feature of Web2.0, it is became so popular because many Web2.0 sites heavily use Ajax. In real we can create Web2.0 web-site with described features of Web2.0 without Ajax.
Web2.0 websites typically use some of the following features:
* CSS: separation of presentation and content
* REST or JSON-based APIs: system inegration and separation
* Rich Internet application techniques: Ajax, Flex, Flash
* Syndication, and aggregation: RSS or Atom feeds
* Weblog-publishing tools, and social networking tools: chat, forum, wiki, ..
Now as you have rough understanding of Web2.0 main question is what is:
Semantic Web (Web3.0)?
Another useful standard
Unlike Web2.0 Semantic Web is a W3C standard[http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/] and so we can find final definition of it.
“The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF).”
According to Semantic Web home page
Talking common language:
Semantic Web is a way to store all data in such way to provide easy way for any application to use it.
It provide special formats for storing and querying of data.
“The big picture: imagine having one query language, one client, and one data access protocol which let you arbitrarily slice the data of Flickr, delicious, Google, and your favorite Web 2.0 sites, FOAF files, RSS 1.0 feeds — plus anything that can be mapped into RDF. This is data integration the Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web way.”
Good general description from “Talking Points for Semantic Web vs. Web2.0″ [http://www.w3.org/2006/05/SW_Web2.html]
Nevertheless potential useful points of Semantic Web and even some use-cases [http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/]
we still very far from any production use of it.
In real life we can still use XML[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML], RDBMS [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDBMS], and SOA [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture] to get similar behavior today.
