Within a year or two, mass-consumer Semantic Web products and services will hit the market and within five years there will be “killer apps” of Semantic Web, according to Juan-Antonio Sanchez, Ericsson expert at System Management Strategic Technology Intelligence. 

Actually, what is the Semantic Web?
“Semantic Web is about extending the World Wide Web by enabling people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications and websites. It is one of the most significant things to happen since the Web itself.

“Semantic Web is a set of technologies designed to enable a web in which all the knowledge exists in a format that software applications can understand and reason about. The technology behind the semantic web can label, evaluate, compare and integrate different kinds of information and present the result for the user. The objective is to enable people, groups, organizations and communities to be smarter, working with knowledge more intelligently.

What has been done so far?
“There already are some main technologies defined such as Resource Description Framework (RDF). The content on today’s websites can be understood by humans but not by computers, which leads to limited search results. Search engines, for example, cannot differentiate between people’s names and street names. RDF technology will allow computers to understand such differences. The technology works automatically and is invisible to the user.”

“The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is developing ontologies to define sensors’ capabilities and semantic annotations to be used on sensor networks. Furthermore, research projects with significant industrial participation, such as the EU’s SENSEI project which Ericsson is part of, are looking into the area.

“But many things have to converge for this to take off. In addition to the existing core standards the ontologies have to come into being and mature – and we need a few real ‘killer apps’ to prove their value and to drive adoption of the Semantic Web paradigm. A primary issue is to structure the huge amount of information available on the Web and on the computer systems.

“Semantic Web is one of the key technologies in Web 3.0 and will be a main enabler in the Web 4.0 attempt to connect the physical world to the internet.”

What does Semantic Web mean for the telecom world?
“The operators have a big opportunity when evolving from channel providers to information, knowledge and experience providers. The operator has a huge amount of information about its users that may be combined with other information in the web. The information can then be transformed; not only internally but also for customers.”

“An interesting example is a mobile content-recommendation system created in South Korea, which includes the semantic web and the IP Multimedia Subsystem. The system gathers information on user behavior and habits, and uses that information to recommend new services and content for each individual user.”