How Books Will Become Machines / quote 4 of 21
Turning the web of documents into one database
Tim Berners-Lee and the other members of the W3C have been arguing for a long time about the importance of producing standards enabling semantic tagging and organization of information (Berners-Lee, 1999). The web is currently a web of documents. It should become a web of well-structured data. Thus, the goal of the semantic web is organize worldwide information at a superior level of abstraction than the document unit. One current incarnation of this effort is the RDF format (Resource Description Framework) that permits to decompose the information into set of triplets. Each triplet contains a subject (the resource to described for instance an URL), a predicate (the property applicable to this resource, also an URL) and an object (also an URL). Such triplets form complex graphs over algorithms can perform various computations. The implicit encyclopedic ambition of the RDF format is to transform all the data contained in the docu- ments of the web in a single huge database, even if in practice several databases of this sort are currently created in parallel. The success of failure of this endeavor will depend directly on the way such coding could be done in practice through an organized self-motivated collaborative process. It is not clear for the moment how this will happen.