The semantic Web: prospects and challenges

The Web grew in five years from a development project to a global business. In contrast the semantic Web has spent ten years developing from a plan to introduce metadata to the Web to a suite of technologies that are used in niche markets, but are far from the global commodity business of the Web. There remain fundamental problems in implementing the vision of a semantic Web, which require both original technical research and considerable consensus building to reach agreed solutions. Many of the successes of the semantic Web are in small technologies such as RSS, Dublin Core and FOAF, while the main thrust of research is in big technologies such as ontological modeling and inference engines. The links between the small and large, as well as an understanding of the resulting benefits are required to move the semantic Web into the mainstream Web