BY THE time the web began to be widely used, around a decade ago, its inventor was already working on a more ambitious plan. Tim Berners-Lee was imagining the ultimate "mash-up": a web in which any sort of data - from train timetables to scientific papers - could be seamlessly combined. The days of trawling through results from search engines would be over. Instead, browsers would navigate in search of answers, not web pages.
Although many still doubt this so-called "semantic web" will take off, the first concrete steps have recently been taken. Over the past year, several large data sources, most notably Wikipedia, have been converted into formats that make them easier to combine. Software that integrates these data sources is also being developed. The results are not yet user-friendly, but the semantic web, so long in gestation, may finally be coming into being.
Monday, June 2, 2008
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