This month’s Scientific American (Dec 2007, 297:6) features an 8 pages long article entitled The Semantic Web in Action by Feigenbaum, L. et.al.
The authors basically discuss the Semantic Web vision as laid out by Tim Berners-Lee, et.al. in the famous 2001 The Semantic Web article, and how some steps towards such a Semantic Web have been made.
In it, they define the semantic web as
A set of formats and languages that find and analyze data on the World Wide Web, allowing consumers and businesses to understand all kinds of useful online information.
A tad general perhaps, but anyways… On the technology front, RDF/OWL and some uses and applications of these technologies, like FAOF, is mentioned, while a few use cases are discussed.
Although the use cases are interesting, the authors fail to even mention Topic Maps as a semantic web technology, and limit the technological discussion to RDF/OWL alone, stating that “The data language, called Resource Description Language (RDF)…” (emphasis added). Read the full post »
