Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Now that the semantic web community has created a set of standards that make it easier to share data and some information about what that data represents more widely on the web, Dr. James Hendler is thinking about what is going to be needed to keep it growing, exciting and moving.

Recognized as one of the inventors of the Semantic Web, Hendler since the start of last year has been the Tetherless World Chair of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., where he focuses on issues pertaining to the web of data that is being built — and what we’re going to do with it.

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The Tetherless World organization is still in a startup phase, with RPI having recently added Deborah L. McGuinness, who previously led the Knowledge Systems Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford, as a chair as well. RPI is in the process of looking for a third faculty member to create what Hendler calls a “real center of gravity” around the area of web science and the world wide web’s future use.

“Essentially the future is that your information doesn’t live on a specific machine on a specific desk that you can only get to at a certain time,” says Hendler. “We would like you to be able to get to the information you need, whether it is on your desktop, on the web, or in someone else’s system, if you are allowed to see it, and in a form that’s appropriate for where you are and what you are doing. It’s information anywhere.”

What role does semantic technology have to play in that? By enabling computers to interpret the meaning and context of words and numbers, you can enable rules-based policy access that resides within a system rather than with an individual, or understand better where information comes from. And you can do it in a scalable way. As an example, Hendler cites a friend who runs a Girl Scout troop and has had to create a set of manual rules and password protections around who can see what pictures on the troop’s site.

“Why not just say any girl in the troop can see the following pictures, and let the computers work on proving that that person is in the troop?” he says. “It’s how to move to the infrastructure stuff that would otherwise be done with [other forms of] agreements. They all sound easy as small and very specific little cases, but now to do that with all sorts of information all over the place at very different levels of access, that’s what the semantic web is about.”

Semantics also helps with issues of provenance that will have to be sorted out to retain trust and trustworthiness on a web where information is moved through various processes, mashed up, pulled into reports, and so on. Married to rules-based policies, information can be released with certain restrictions around it, and richer metadata around that information will enable users or organizations to track whether those restrictions are adhered to or violated, as well as validate original sources.

“There are really three things we are doing at the (Tetherless World) Constellation, as well as deepening of our semantic web work and infrastructure stuff,” Hendler says. “Web science — no one really studies the web. Lots of people do little studies on parts of the web, but the engineering of the future of the web, its policy implications, sort of needs a field. I’m teaching the first course on that here this term.

The Constellation also wants to push people to look more closely at scaling
the simple reasoning that is required on triple stores, and to create a data
center of sorts to explore the role that semantic technologies will have in
the various informatics disciplines, such as bio-informatics and
chem.-informatics.

“Even though there are Semantic Web technologies mature enough to be used today, researchers need to keep making the case that there’s a lot of exciting, important work to be done [on the semantic web],” says Hendler.

That is surely the case, as the Tetherless World Constellation makes plain.

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