¶ … metadata has become one of the hottest topics surrounding the World Wide Web. Metadata forms the basis for the development of the new Semantic Web, a technology touted as a revolutionary advance in how people use the Internet. The Semantic Web will be built on a technologically-driven understanding of the meaning (or semantics) of information, and an accompanying understanding of the relationships between these meanings. It is thought that the Semantic Web will bring incredible advances in how the web is used, including improving scheduling and the marketplace.
Despite the touted advantages of using metadata in the new Semantic web, there are some serious potential issues that must be worked out before the Semantic web is a viable and successful reality. Some of these issues are purely technical problems with creating meaning (semantics) out of the syntax of metadata. Other issues, that are potentially even more problematic, include privacy issues. The Semantic Web may, paradoxically, provide anonymity to criminals, while creating a variety of serious privacy issues for individuals and businesses.
This paper will review and analyze two recent Internet-based articles about the future of the Semantic Web, and uses of metadata. The specific articles reviewed within this paper are as follows:
1) T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, and O. Lassila, The Semantic Web, Scientific American (50), May, 2001. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21,and 2) Ford, Paul. How Google Beat Amazon and EBay to the Semantic Web. Brooklyn, NY: Ftrain, 2002. http://www.ftrain.com/google_takes_all.html
What is Metadata?
Simply put, metadata is just data about data. It describes the content, characteristics, and quality of data. For different professional communities, metadata can have different definitions. For example, metadata was first used mostly within communities that manipulated geospatial data, and referred to standards and internal and external documentation and data that were needed to identify, represent, manage, perform and use data in an information system (Gilliland-Swetland).
Gilliland- Swetland considers that metadata should be considered "the sum total of what one can say about any information object at any level of aggregation." In this definition, an information object is simply anything that can be manipulated as a discrete identity. It can be a single item or consist of many items. Information objects have three consistent features that can be reflected in metadata: 1) content, 2) context, and 3) structure (Gilliland- Swetland).
Metadata can take many forms. Administrative metadata like acquisition information can be used to manage and administer information resources, while descriptive metadata like catalogue resources identify or describe information resources (Gilliland- Swetland).
Ford - How Google Beat Amazon and EBay to the Semantic Web
Paul Ford's article, How Google Beat Amazon and EBay to the Semantic Web, is a fictional article published at a future date in a business magazine in 2009. In the article, Ford describes a scenario where the search engine Google has come to dominate the Semantic web. Google makes $17 billion per annum from Google Marketplace, while Amazon makes $1 billion, and EBay pulls in $1.8 billion.
Ford describes the Semantic way as "just a way to describe things in a way that a computer can 'understand.'" He goes notes logic is the basis of the Semantic web, which is based on a markup language called Resource Description Framework (RDF) that allows you to enter logical statements on the web, and have these statements searched, analyzed, and processed.
So far, the process for the Semantic Web is similar that for a regular search engine. In the case of the Semantic web, however, logical statements written in RTF can be combined. As such, the Semantic web defines relationships between things "whether one thing is a part of another, or how much a thing costs, or when it happened" (Ford).
In this fictional essay, Ford notes that the Simweb was designed to give the World Wide Web intelligence in expressing relationships. When Google first began to experiment with the Simweb in 2003, it was still little understood by most people, learning it was difficult, and coders were scarce. The Simweb promised a great improvement in scheduling appointments, checking schedules, coordinating shipments, updating you computer, and searching for things.
One of the great challenges in creating the Semantic web, notes Ford, was getting meaning (or semantics) out of information (or syntax). Humans are proficient at this task, but as of the early 2000's, computers were not. Ford notes that Google went on the basic idea that meaning in the Simweb could be generated by throwing "together so much syntax from so many people that there's a...
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