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Abstract

Six years ago in this magazine, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila unveiled a nascent vision of the Semantic Web: a highly interconnected network of data that could be easily accessed and understood by any desktop or handheld machine. They painted a future of intelligent software agents that would head out on the World Wide Web and automatically book flights and hotels for our trips, update our medical records and give us a single, customized answer to a particular question without our having to search for information or pore through results. They also presented the young technologies that would make this vision come true: a common language for representing data that could be understood by all kinds of software agents; ontologies--sets of statements--that translate information from disparate databases into common terms; and rules that allow software agents to reason about the information described in those terms. The data format, ontologies and reasoning software would operate like one big application on the World Wide Web, analyzing all the raw data stored in online databases as well as all the data about the text, images, video and communications the Web contained. Like the Web itself, the Semantic Web would grow in a grassroots fashion, only this time aided by working groups within the World Wide Web Consortium, which helps to advance the global medium. Since then skeptics have said the Semantic Web would be too difficult for people to understand or exploit. Not so. The enabling technologies have come of age. A vibrant community of early adopters has agreed on standards that have steadily made the Semantic Web practical to use. Large companies have major projects under way that will greatly improve the efficiencies of in-house operations and of scientific research. Other firms are using the Semantic Web to enhance business-to-business interactions and to build the hidden data-processing structures, or back ends, behind new consumer services. And like an iceberg, the tip of this large body of work is emerging in direct consumer applications, too.