Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web

I got to hear about the next big thing yesterday. No, not the Arctic Monkeys. I’m talking about the Semantic Web.

Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee told an audience of MIT business partners yesterday that there’s plenty of work remaining on the Semantic Web, but that it still could start making its presence felt at companies in the next year or two. The Semantic Web’s focus is on making it easier to share and mine data, the sort of data neglected by the World Wide Web and trapped in databaes, spreadsheets and other pre-Web programs. If it takes off, expect to start hearing terms such as RDF, OWL and SparQL, some of the Semantic Web’s key underpinnings.

Berners-Lee said a big part of the battle is still explaining to people what he’s talking about. One mid-course correction that his team is making, he said, is putting more emphasis on a browser for this data. “Data is less exciting with no browser,” he said. “We really should have put some emphasis into nice Web browsers.”

Bob Brown, bbrown@nww.com