|  《拥抱Web 3.0》- 由语义网技术权威Ora Lassila和James Hendler撰文 
 
  下载地址: http://www.mindswap.org/papers/2007/90-93.pdf  部分摘要:
  In an article published in The New York Times
 this past November, reporter John Markoff stated
 that “commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or
 the ‘Semantic Web,’ for the idea of adding meaning
 — is only now emerging.”1 This characterization
 caused great confusion with respect to the
 relationships between the Semantic Web and the
 Web itself, as well as between the Semantic Web
 and some aspects of the so-called Web 2.0. Some
 wanted to reject the term “Web 3.0” as too
 business-oriented; others felt that the vision in the
 article was only part of the larger Semantic Web
 vision, and still others felt that, whatever it was
 called, the Semantic Web’s arrival in the Business
 section of The New York Times reflected an important
 coming of age.
 With the Resource Description Framework
 (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) — the
 languages that power the Semantic Web — becoming
 standards and new technologies reaching
 maturity for embedding semantics in existing Web
 pages and querying RDF knowledge stores, something
 exciting is clearly happening in this area.
 Semantic Web Background
 With more than 10 years’ work on the Semantic
 Web’s foundations and more than five years since
 the phrase became popular, it’s an opportune
 moment to look at the field’s current state and
 future opportunities. From a humble beginning as
 a methodology for machine-interpretable metadata
 and through a “world-embracing” vision of a
 new era of software (often — erroneously, in our
 opinion — attributed as science fiction), the
 Semantic Web has matured into a set of standards
 that support “open” data and a view of information
 processing that emphasizes information rather
 than processing.
 From one viewpoint, the Semantic Web is the
 symbiosis of Web technologies and knowledge
 representation (KR), which is a subfield of artificial
 intelligence (AI) concerned with constructing
 and maintaining (potentially complex) models of
 the world that enable reasoning about themselves
 and their associated information. As such, we can
 understand the Semantic Web through the lessons
 learned from the Web’s development and adoption,
 as well as (perhaps somewhat painfully) from the
 deployment of AI technologies.
 On the Web, we’ve seen the emergence of some
 completely new business models that do indeed
 work, despite initially seeming infeasible. These
 include the models introduced or perfected by
 Netscape (creating a community by giving stuff
 away), Amazon and eBay (marketplaces), and
 Yahoo! and Google (advertising-supported sites).
 Sharing data (or content, as it’s often called when
 discussing the Web) has unexpected and serendipitous
 outcomes — once you make something available,
 you have no idea how some people will use
 it. The long-tail phenomenon — for example,
 aggregate sales of low-selling items, such as specialized
 books, surpassing the total number of bestsellers
 sold — defies traditional thinking about
 business models, but it’s important to the new Webbased
 economy. Web sites don’t really exist in isolation
 — linking is what makes search engines work
 and gives the “blogosphere” its power.
 From the euphoria surrounding AI in the 1980s
 through the hangover of the “AI winter” in the
 1990s, we’ve learned what doesn’t work: you can’t
 sell a stand-alone “AI application.” These technologies
 make sense only when embedded within
 other systems. Tools are hard to sell and often fail
 to make good business sense (they certainly don’t
 make sense according to venture capitalists). Finally,
 thinking of AI itself, we observe that reasoning
 engines are a means to an end, rather than the end
 itself; how you use them is more important than
 the mere fact that you use them.
 
 
 
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