It didn’t prove as anticipated.
Bear in mind the Semantic Internet? Most likely not. It was all the trend about twenty years in the past. However these days, mentions of it are uncommon.
After beginning with a daring imaginative and prescient for a brand new Internet (see beneath), the Semantic Internet progressively misplaced steam and pale into the background little by little. Nonetheless, there by no means was a type of “reckoning” about why it was so… till now that the Semantic Internet imaginative and prescient has to think about the presence of the disruptive and flashy Generative AI know-how.
On this submit, I look at why the Semantic Internet, regardless of shedding its preliminary shine, is an important piece of the Internet puzzle, even coexisting with the brand new Generative AI, and why Knowledge Science professionals ought to pay attention to it too.
However first, let’s check out the person behind the creation of the Semantic Internet.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee (TimBL) proposed the idea of the Semantic Internet (SW) in 1999 whereas he was working on the World Vast Internet Consortium (W3C). The thought was to create an internet of information that machines may course of, permitting them to know the which means of the data and make connections between completely different items of information.
We should perceive that the SW was a second act for Tim Berners-Lee. In 1999 he was already a worldwide (no pun meant) celeb because the creator of the World Vast Internet way back.
It was 1990 when, as a visiting scholar on the CERN in Switzerland, he proposed to make the Internet a actuality to his boss, Mike Sendall, who discovered the proposal “obscure however thrilling.” TimBL stated he invented nearly nothing as a result of the hyperlinks, the web protocols, and plenty of different parts have been already out there. Nonetheless, no one had taken the step of placing all of them collectively in place.
As TimBL put it,
I simply needed to take the hypertext concept and join it to the TCP and DNS concepts, and — ta-da! — the World Vast Internet.
A small step for man…
The primary internet web page ever constructed continues to be out there at this tackle—no fancy formatting, only a large textual content on the prime stating “residence of the primary web site.”