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Last week, our lab had the honor to welcome Prof. James Hendler who gave a nice talk
about what is going-on in the semantic web. Actually, with Tim Berners Lee, J. Hendler is one of the
pioneers of the Semantic Web and was working on this field far away before it
was even christened "Semantic Web".
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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