In a widely cited presentation in 2000,
Tim Berners-Lee of the W3C consortium (the World Wide Web's
governing body) presented his vision of the Semantic Web, a next-generation Internet where
the ability of computers to make 'intelligent' deductions and decisions from machine-readable
data would be possible, "... creating a web that can be interpreted by machines"
. The current
Web model, using pages marked up in HTML, is limited in providing methods in which the huge amount
of data stored in static web pages may be usefully searched and indexed. The new Semantic Web
is about data and the relationships that exist between data, and views the Web as a vast database,
moving away from traditional delivery of static web pages to dynamic, user-oriented
services which provide content customized to each person who visits
the page, or uses the service.
Gradually the components (technologies and standards) required to create such an internet are
being realised, principally :
- XML - the generalized eXtensible Markup Language - a meta-language which allows people
to define context-specific tags and the structural relationships between them.
Chemical Markup Language is now a mainstream scientific XML language
- RDF - Resource Description Framework. A framework for data and metadata description and
exchange. It is based upon the idea of making statements about resources in the form
of a subject-predicate-object (or a resource-property-value) expression (called a
triple in RDF
terminology). The value of one property can in turn be used as the resource for another.
- OWL - Web Ontology Language is a further machine-processable language which is used to
define classes of information and relationships between them.
This is a developing situation which has yet to achieve a maturity where people can buy
off-the-shelf solutions. The development of such semantic applications will be
expensive and, as yet, working applications are only at the development stage. Nevertheless,
the development of a
Semantic Web for Chemistry is seen as realisable.
