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| Future Focus - Tomorrow's Insights for Today's Decision Makers |
| Making The Web Meaningful |
April 2002 |
Aaron Kumove -- Managing Director, Horizon Consulting |
| The Web is a wonderful
place for people to find out and do all kinds of things but it’s currently
a lousy place for machines to get much useful work done. That may
seem like an odd statement but it is entirely consistent with the development
and history of the Web thus far. From its beginnings the Web has
been mostly about presenting information to people from machines, not about
enabling the automation of processing from one machine to another.
This evolutionary truth has enormous significance if we are to attempt
to leverage the Web for the purposes of automation of business processes
and electronic trading with others. The attainment of these goals
means that we will need to get machines conversing directly with each other,
and this is frankly not something that the Web is very well suited for
today.
HTML, the language
of Web pages defines the “look” of a document but not it’s content.
It is only because of the innate power that we all have between our ears that we are able to discern that “12345” in the example above is a part number. This task which is trivial for people is actually a major headache for a machine on the web. To enable a machine to know that “12345” as a part number and then take some action based on knowing that can require significant effort by software designers and coders. i.e. a custom solution will be required that will cost time and money. This is hardly a way to ensure that electronic B2B trading will scale to the massive levels that many are predicting. Clearly, if we wish to undertake collaborative electronic business with others we are going to have to figure out how to make information meaningful to the machines that participate in these interactions untouched by human hands. Otherwise how will they know what to do? The electronically interconnected processing model that I referred to last month will never come to be if we cannot solve this most fundamental problem. Well, somebody has
come up with what is a generally agreed solution and that somebody is the
World Wide Web Consortium. The solution that they came up with is
XML. XML is designed to provide the semantic framework that HTML
lacks and that machines need have defined so that they can know what a
particular piece of text refers to, and therefore can make a decision on
what to do with it. The part number problem above becomes much simpler
for machines that communicate with each other in XML rather than HTML.
All of the content on the Web today may as well be in ancient Greek as far as our ability to use it for the purpose of automation goes. It is without meaning. It is a large library of books in a foreign language to the machines that attempt to use it. Tim Berners-Lee when he invented the Web in 1989 intended for it to carry more semantics than became common practice as the Web grew exponentially in the ‘90’s. But now the walls are being hit as we move from using the Web to present information to people, to using it to automate processes driven by machines. The semantic barrier is now a stumbling block in the way of eBusiness. If Berners-Lee is right, (and I would think twice before betting against him,) the Semantic Web will be more revolutionary and have a greater impact than the original Web as we know it today. The first wave of the Web presented information from machines to people. The next wave will be about machines presenting information to, and interacting with other machines to automate many business functions. This is where the real revolutionary changes begin. Today’s Web has compressed space and time and brought the world into everyone’s back yard, but it may end up as mere topsoil compared to the seismic shifts that the Semantic Web may bring.
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Aaron Kumove -- Managing Director, Horizon Consulting |
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| Copyright
© 2002 HORIZON CONSULTING
Horizon Consulting is a leading provider of successful strategy and management implementation services for knowledge economy organisations. Our clients are world leaders in obtaining strategic advantage through eBusiness and Information Technology. Horizon Consulting
PO Box 2252, Wellington, New Zealand; Tel: 64 4 939-9944;
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