Imagine if you could talk to the Web and it could understand. That is the promise of a potentially revolutionary project being pioneered at NUI Galway to turn today's Web into a semantic Web. This means a Web in which the information held on billions of Web pages will know what kind of information it is and how and when it is useful to someone.
Today's Web is like a library where a human has to evaluate the usefulness of particular information. The semantic Web - semantics is a linguistic term for the study of meaning in language - would know that certain bits of information it holds are relevant to the type of search or task you are doing.
If the Web could do this on its own, a search engine like Google would know you were looking for a city when you type in "Galway", whereas now, it just knows you are looking for that particular sequence of letters, which of themselves have no context or meaning, explains Dr Christof Bussler. Dr Bussler is vice director of NUI Galway's Digital Enterprise Research Institute, where semantic Web research is to form a core part of activity.
"From a user perspective, that would be very valuable," he says. And from a business perspective, it would be hugely beneficial because it would enable that holy grail of business-to-business interaction, the much-touted area called Web services.
That's why DERI, introduced this week by the Tánaiste, Ms Harney, has received a €12 million grant from Science Foundation Ireland - and about €34 million to date - for semantic Web research. SFI sees this type of work - focused, wide-impact, high profile work that doesn't need a huge physical research infrastructure - as exactly suited to growing world class R&D in the Republic. That's why it has funded DERI director Prof Dieter Fensel as one of its key researchers - Prof Fensel is considered a leading international figures in semantic Web research.
Such too is the lucrative promise of the semantic Web that HP has partnered with DERI, putting eight full-time researchers and an undisclosed amount, "millions" according to HP Galway managing director Mr Rory O'Connor, towards the project. "This is an area we're very keen to explore, and where we see rich opportunity," he says.
The semantic Web works by enabling information held on the Web to be annotated (or "tagged") to identify it more precisely - is it a book, a city, a ticketing destination, a person, a bank account, a country? The Web user doesn't see the annotations - they are hidden within the structure of a Web page, using specialised languages that are precise in meaning and which machines can read (meaning other computers connected over the Web or an internal network).
HTML, or hypertext markup language ( the early, basic computer language used to create Web pages) gives only a tiny bit of information about the data held on a page, says Dr Bussler. Newer languages like XML allow far more information to be added, but not enough yet for the kinds of seamless, sophisticated transactions and exchanges of information hoped for in fully-fledged Web services.
At DERI, researchers - about 70 so far, with more to be added - are working with new languages with odd acronyms like OWL and RDF(S). The piece of information on the Web, or object, and its set of associated details described in one of these languages, is called an ontology.
Ontologies are like small social worlds surrounding an object, full of information about it, and giving it real meaning. "Now what you do, is you refine it and make it more expressive," says Dr Bussler.
As the Web becomes populated by more and more ontologies, a mesh of meaningful information begins to develop - allowing an integration and exchange of information between computers regardless of make or operating system. This all happens automatically as well, and is not reliant on a bank of programmers redesigning the Web, he says.
Languages like RDF(S) and OWL can lie behind such common Web interactive items as an order form. As you type information into the form to place an order or sign up for a service, each entry to a field can be tagged with a classification, making that information part of the semantic Web. Because the knowledge management process is invisible to the end user, the semantic Web is sometimes referred to as the invisible semantic Web, he says.
Indeed, the semantic Web already is emerging unseen to users, as new, expressively-tagged objects are added daily to the Web's vast storehouse of data. "The semantic Web will be the largest informational database that has ever existed," says Prof Fensel.
It is also a way of re-seeing how intelligence can be added to machines.
Work in artificial intelligence seeks to create a machine that can think like a human brain. "Too much effort," notes Prof Fensel. The semantic Web instead makes intelligent information available to humans who know how they want to use it.
"We don't want to compete with the human brain, but we can set up a brain of human memory," he says. "Because, in a sense, the Web is the collective memory of humankind." Such observations speak to the exciting ways in which a semantic Web could transform today's Web, wedging the Web even further into the globe's social and cultural development in ways we cannot yet see.
But for now, the real driver to developing the technologies needed is business - so that first, information is more accessible and meaningful, and second, applications can manipulate that information in useful ways.
For many years, businesses have waited on the promise of easy data exchange between business partners, suppliers, customers and clients, but all systems have had limitations - high cost, difficulty working with other operating systems or networks, difficulty to set up and use.
Most recently, the companies that create software for businesses have laid great claims for the promise of Web services, but as yet, little of real value has emerged. The semantic Web, it is believed, would finally make Web services truly possible because information could be far more easily sought, handled and exchanged across the neutral medium of the Web.
In business to business exchanges, "the whole chain of supply that builds up is very complex," says HP's Mr O'Connor. "What to a human being seems an obvious question - machines don't understand that. The semantic Web is an arbitration of the confusion." That's what has HP and other DERI technology industry partners such as SAP so excited about the semantic Web.
They already offer applications that manage corporate information and they see the semantic Web as the next major development in how such information is delivered and exchanged.
But the usual technological tussles lie in the way of progress - determining standards, trying to keep any one player from controlling the whole space, convincing Web page designers to utilise the new mark-up languages (which in themselves will continue to evolve, says Dr Bussler).
But the semantic Web in some form or another seems to be the internet's future - and possibly a major part of Ireland's R&D reputation as well.
"I'm absolutely passionate about our \ ability to lead in this space," says Mr O'Connor. "This is one area in which we have all the advantages, and none of the disadvantages."
