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Without knowing exactly the definition of Web 3.0 we can be sure that it will be based on semantics, as Technology Review or the New York Times presented. Technologies are still emerging but we can imagine that when easy-to-use and deploy technologies will allow storing, reasoning and retrieve semantic data, this Semantic Web could be spread rapidly.

There are many remaining challenges, but some people already think about Wb 4.0, a somewhat hazy concept which will be based on this huge network of intelligent agents set by Semantic Web to gather their abilities. This web 4.0 is still a little far awa, but as shown on the roadmap below, semantic web is coming soon.

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Very good news today since our paper, "Explorations in the use of Semantic Web Technologies for Product Information Management", was accepted at WWW 2007 , one the most important international conference about web technologies. For several years this conference has given a special place to Semantic Web and its applications. Our paper is in line with this important evolution of the web and addresses these techniques in some real use cases: the Master Data management and in particular, the Product Information Management.

I would like to thank all my teammates for their efforts and comments to achieve this paper in term of quality and deadline.

See below the abstract of this paper.

With enthusiasm, J. Hendler described us what is going in this challenging area. What is particularly interesting is that we are really moving up in the semantic layer cake! Actually, since I started to work on this topic, I've observed that, year by year, the research focus is being smoothly raised in these layers.

So now the current stage is really higher than ontology, and even beyond the logic layer which is being intensively studied nowadays (notably with DL and Rules). So the hype wave is approaching the proof layer, which is an important layer for the acceptance of Semantic Web.

James gave an example based on transaction over the web: let's assume that a computer A send a bill to a computer B: "You owe me $20". Everybody expects the computer B won't give directly the money and say "Why? Prove it". And so the computer A could say: "you bought this book at this store and as you can see it is at this price". Additionally a rule saying that "when you buy an item you have to pay it" will finalize the proof.

The point is that all these pieces of information are given by RDF triples with references to some URI, so the computer B can check them and if it trusts the referenced site, he can accept the proof.

This example goes beyond some criticisms, notably coming the one from Google Executive, Peter Norvig, who challenged T. Berners-Lee during a conference. It is true that with less human oversight lot of people would attempt to exploit the Semantic Web to make SPAM of get better result to sell you pills of any colored and so it could be difficult to trust such a web. But such comment forgets the concept of proof. Actually what is important is not to say it is the truth, but to give the basis for the other side to know whether this can be the truth according to its beliefs, like we do intuitively when we manually collect data from various location. So have a good grounding is the key: we give the source of the information, so people can decide to trust it or not.

Some big challenges about managing security in such an open infrastructure are coming, but Semantic Web is getting closer.

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Je profite d’un article récent, The Semantic Web Revisited [2], pour présenter l’idée du SW, présentée initialement par Tim Berners-Lee en 2001 [1] dans le but d’enrichir l’information disponible sur internet pour pouvoir la rendre utilisable non seulement par les humains mais aussi par les ordinateurs.

Tout comme les physiciens du CERN avaient permis de porter le web vers le succès, l’article souligne que l’utilisation d’ontologies, un des concepts clés du Semantic Web, dans les e-sciences pourrait pousser l’adoption des technologies du web sémantique vers d’autres communautés (notamment les sciences environnementales) avant de s’étendre à toute la communauté internet.

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