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Semantic Web: a Working Symposium in StanfordPart 1A symposium was held at Stanford from July 30 to August 1, 2001, to discuss the state of art of the Semantic Web. There were nearly 70 submissions, 250 participants. This workshop indicates that a new Semantic Web community is emerging. This article, the first of two, summarizes the major points that were presented at this workshop. The Semantic Web aims to provide new ways to define and link data on the Web, not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse across various applications. The full potential on the Web is going to be fulfilled with the ability to enable sophisticated Web services, for commerce and for exchange of high-value information. The Semantic Web project, as driven by W3C, is a mixture of theoretical and applied research work which takes advantage of various fields not connected until now. This project is designed to eventually provide standard solutions, independent of any proprietary implementation. Given the complexity of some of the applications being described, this task is not an obvious one, and this symposium was one important step on this path. The symposium provided a forum to present the state of the art in various technologies and approaches needed to make the Semantic Web a reality. The symposium was divided in plenary sessions and tracks operating in parallel. The last day plenary was a report on the discussions of the various tracks and provided a synthesis of the work done. For the readers who want a detailed report on this symposium, the proceedings are available on the Web (12 MB PDF file) at: http://www.semanticweb.org/SWWS/program/full/SWWSProceedings.pdf. The Semantic Web workshop was organized by Isabel Cruz (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA), Stefan Decker (Stanford University, USA), Jérôme Euzenat (INRIA, France) and Deborah McGuinness (Stanford University, USA) and was sponsored by VerticalNet, Nokia, SpiritSoft, EnigmaTec.Net, Empolis, Connotate Technologies, Mondeca, Language and Computing, Solution Clustering (SC4), Network Inference, Ontoprise and INRIA. Positioning the Semantic WebDr. James Hendler who has been the DARPA Program Manager for the DAML initiative until August 2001, introduced the workshop by stating that the Semantic Web already exists. The Web is evolving from presentation to metadata and then to knowledge. Making it grow is what this meeting is about, Hendler said. Eric Miller, who is the lead for the Semantic Web Activity at W3C, presented his vision of the Semantic Web, as the continuation of the original proposal of the World Wide Web expressed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989: how information about a web of relationships amongst named objects could unify a number of information management tasks. We need machines to help us to realize our ultimate goal: effective and efficient global knowledge exchange. (Full presentation available at http://www.w3.org/Talks/2001/07/30-swws/). RDF (Resource Description Framework) is the foundation on which various other languages are built. The core of RDF is being rebuilt now and will replace RDF-Schemas (RDFS), in order to provide a more reliable level of interoperability between applications and issue a specification which is easier to understand. The Web needs to provide services and become a web of trust. Descriptive logic is being used in order to launch automatic processes over the data which are encoded on the Web. Rules and query languages being built on top of RDF should provide this level of operation. The Semantic Web includes exploration of various prototypes, experiments over ideas which may well become important for the whole industry in a near future. The "Semantic Web Advanced Development" (SWAD) describes what is being done by the research community in this area, and serves as testbed for early implementations of working drafts. It is described as a collaborative development environment for the teams involved in this activity. Eric mentioned the examples of Algae, a simple constraint-based query interface made by Eric Prud'hommeaux, the Closed World Machine developed by Dan Connolly and Tim Berners-Lee, DAML tools written in Python, a collaborative annotation system called Annotea, plug-ins to the Amaya HTML editor, calendaring tools such as those built by Libby Miller, among others. Eric Miller distinguished between what is hot and what is hard now in the Semantic Web activities: what is hot are the new, small, RDF-based applications, vocabulary mapping, visualization tools, reasoning over web documents, the assembly of disparate web site information brokering. What is hard are building tools for digital signatures, proof generation, and the fundamental mismatch between classical semantics of the "whole" and the extremely localized, socially grounded meaning of real human interactive data modeling for the masses. One other hard problem is the exploitation of legacy data for extracting meaningful data. Eric Miller described a number of open issues: is URI-based addressing going to be sufficient? A clearer relationship of the interaction of the RDF and XML family of standards is still needed. It is important to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between the Semantic Web and Web services. Eric also pointed out that additional technologies, such as topic maps, are still required. He ended his presentation by expressing the wish that cooperation with other groups working on similar issues will happen, namely the Open Source and Gnu-based initiatives. Topic Maps and the Semantic WebThere was an invited talk given by two of the co-editors of the Topic Maps standards, Steven R. Newcomb and Michel Biezunski. This presentation emphasized a difference between "clothed topic maps", the model that contains topics, names, occurrences and associations, and "unclothed topic maps", the underlying graph-like representation of topic maps. In a Semantic Web context, Topic Maps can be used to make notions addressable. Once notions are addressable, they can be processed in many different ways by a number of other languages for the Semantic Web. (The full presentation is available on the Web at: http://www.topicmaps.net/SWW3.htm) Part 2 of Mr. Biezunski's report on the Semantic Web Symposium in Stanford will appear in the next issue of XML Files. |
