Tim Berners-Lee has a blog: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4
He had to turn off comments for his 1st post, after getting 455 comments within the first week....
Semantic Web
He'll be discussing Semantic Web stuff mostly. The Semantic Web, as you most likely know, is the idealistic (read: standardized) vision of the 'Web 2.0' buzz you've been hearing about so much this year: exposed website API's that can be consumed by people, as well as other applications. Tim wrote his 'Semantic Web Road Map' as most people were discovering web 1.0, over 7 years ago, in September 1998! The idea of the Semantic Web is to have standards in place for data as well as context for that data.
RDF & OWL are formats to describe and relate data to context. It looks like the RDF format is our answer to standardizing data online, potentially enabling sites to expose their knowledge in a common way (as opposed to the separate site-specific ways today).
OWL is an ontology format used to tag data with organizational data like relationships (piano is an instrument), equality (ford is same as a piece of crap), and other properties & characteristics to objectively identify the context of something. You can view the very insightful slide deck from Jim Hendler's XML2005 Keynote: From Atom's to Owl's: The new ecology of the WWW.
N3
Adoption of RDF has been slow, due to it's apparent complexity. N3 is a format that was designed as a shorthand, non-XML version of RDF, created specifically for human readibility. N3 provides an easier entry-point into the Semantec Web with a format that's more easily understood, and more abstract from all the RDF craziness.
Rough Guide to N3
N3 Specification
N3 Primer
ConsortiumInfo.org has an awesome Semantic Web interview with Tim from July here.
W3C Semantic Web Site
Web 2.0 on del.icio.us
Tim's previous writings can be found on his Design Issues page, http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues.
Print | posted on Tuesday, December 27, 2005 8:48 PM