Get Real, get the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web gets real, "And yet the Semantic Web may ultimately hold the answer to many of the knotty problems raised by Web services and other machine-to-machine communications schemes. A handful of major players including Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nokia, and even the Department of Defense have thrown resources at it--the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which founded the Internet, is a backer..."We fundamentally believe that the Semantic Web is the only way we can solve the very difficult issues of the growing complexity of information systems," says Celcorp's CEO Jas Dhillon. He acknowledges that building ontologies can be "very time consuming and painful." But, claims Dhillon, "one of our breakthroughs is that we can automatically extract the ontology of the system and the process" as the first step in developing its Celware applications. Another milestone in easing ontology development was the W3C's release last summer of a working draft for a Web Ontology Language (abbreviated OWL)."