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Semantic web standards

The 

semantic web

 is a concept promoted by Tim  Berners-  Lee and the World Wide Web 

Consortium (www.w3.org) to improve upon the capabilities of the current World Wide 

Web. Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and linguistic expressions. For 

example, the word ‘father’ has the semantic elements male, human and parent and ‘girl’ has 

the elements female, human and young. The semantic web is about how to define mean-

ing for the content of the web to make it easier to locate relevant information and services 

rapidly. As mentioned above, finding information on a particular topic through search-

ing the web is inexact since there isn’t a standard way of describing the content of web 

pages. The semantic web describes the use of metadata through standards such as XML, 

RDF and the Dublin Core to help users find web resources more readily. Another benefit of 

the semantic web is that it will enable data exchange between software 

agents

 running on 

different server or client computers.

Agents are software programs created to assist humans in performing tasks. In this con-

text they automatically gather information from the Internet or exchange data with other 

agents based on parameters supplied by the user.

Semantic web

Interrelated content 

including data with 

defined meaning, 

enabling better exchange 

of information between 

computers and between 

people and computers.

Agents

Software programs that 

can assist humans by 

automatically gathering 

information from the 

Internet or exchanging 

data with other agents 

based on parameters 

supplied by the user.

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Part 1  Introduction

The applications of the semantic web are best illustrated through examples.  Berners-  Lee 

et al. (2001) give the example of a patient seeking medical treatment for a particular condi-

tion. They envisage a patient having a personal software agent (effectively a search engine) 

which is used to find the best source of treatment. The patient’s agent will interact with the 

doctor’s agent which will describe the symptoms and search pages from different health-

care providers which detail their services. The patient’s agent will then give them the differ-

ent treatment options in terms of cost, effectiveness, waiting time and location. Similarly, 

a  personal agent could be used to find the best flight or a business agent could be used to 

participate in a reverse auction.

Although the concept of the semantic web has been established for over 10 years, there 

have been relatively few commercial applications, suggesting the difficulty of implementa-

tion together with the lack of demand since the search engines perform well in returning 

relevant information. The World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3c.org) has compiled some 

examples which it updates at www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/.