Kingsley Idehen's Blog Data Space

By Jeremy J. Carroll, MultiLingual Computing and Technology

The author gives a brief introduction to the Semantic Web and describes difficulties -- and occasionally solutions -- related to building multilingual Semantic Web sites and applications. The initial drivers for the Semantic Web came from metadata about web pages. Who wrote it?

When? Who owns the copyright? And so on. Conveying such metadata requires agreement about the key terms such as author and date. This agreement has been reached by the Dublin Core community. For example, they have an agreed definition for the term creator, generalizing author for use in metadata records. The Semantic Web does not, however, draw a sharp distinction between metadata about the page and data contained within the page. In both cases, the idea is to provide sufficient structure around the data to turn it into information and to connect the concepts used to express such information with concepts used by others so that this information can become knowledge that can be acted upon.