Breaking the Silos
This chapter introduces the Semantic Web, the notion propounded by Tim Berners-Lee that the Web might record semantic linkages between its components in a way that computers can understand, so potentially creating one global interconnected database. This
- PDF / 551,171 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 11 Downloads / 267 Views
Breaking the Silos
Underneath the Jura mountains, on the border between France and Switzerland, lie the tunnels that house the particle accelerators of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Within these subterranean lairs, high energy particle beams are accelerated to near the speed of light and collided to bring into a transitory existence such elusive creatures as the Higgs boson, the elementary particle whose associated field gives mass to most of its counterparts. It is cutting-edge physics that take place beneath the landscape of the Jura but it impinges less on the imagination of most of the world than an innovation that had its humble origins in the offices of one of CERN’s fellows, Tim Berners-Lee. It was 1989 that Berners-Lee came up with a novel solution to the problem of managing the huge amount of documentation that the operations at CERN were generating every day. He particularly saw the potential of a technique known as hypertext, a way of moving between documents by embedding links within the text they contained. Any word or phrase in a hypertext file can be made a ‘hot link’: by choosing it, the user is taken straight to another file that the link points to. It was a quick and easy way to get a grip on a confusing mass of information and make it more manageable as it continued to grow. Berners-Lee put together a simple graphical interface to his hypertext system which he had by then given the name World Wide Web. This operated much like the more sophisticated graphical browsers of today, such as Firefox or Chrome, allowing users to click on a hyperlink and load the document that perched at its other end. Technical reasons prevented others outside CERN from using the interface and so the epithet ‘World Wide’ might have seemed a little presumptuous at this stage. But it soon managed to spread beyond the confines of its parent institution in the form of a basic line-mode browser designed by a student named Nicola Pellow (Fig. 8.1) [1]. This appears an unassuming start to something that has changed the world as profoundly as the Web. Simple as it may seem now, this browser was doing much the same as its present-day successors that we know so well, joining together documents or other objects by embedded hyperlinks. Berners-Lee’s most inspired idea
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 R. Gartner, Metadata, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40893-4_8
87
88
8
Breaking the Silos
Fig. 8.1 The simple browser that introduced the World Wide Web to the world (image © CERN)
was to use Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to record the address of the objects on the Web so that they could be referenced in this way. CERN already had in place a method for tagging its documentation using a markup language known as SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language). SGML is the precursor to XML, rather more complex (and so powerful) but harder to use and process: it was to simplify its use that XML was to be devised several years later in 1996. To allow hyperlinking, Berners-Lee added a new element, (anch
Data Loading...
