The Semantic Web: differentiating between taxonomies and ontologies.(Brief Article)

There's a new vision of the Web--the Semantic Web--that will dramatically improve Web-based services and products. It creates a setting where software agents perform everyday jobs for end-users. Deploying hierarchies, metadata, and structured vocabularies, the Semantic Web expands basic Internet functions. According to Tim Berners-Lee (writing with James Hendler and Ora Lassila in the May 7, 2001 issue of Scientific American) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Internet has the potential to act as a treasured valet or lady's maid [www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html], an all-knowing, trustworthy source of practical information.

The Semantic Web is about making people's life easier by answering a whole host of familiar ready-reference queries. Berners-Lee imagines a natural language interface for the Semantic Web. For example, a user could type, "What is the best graduate program in business in the New York City area?" An intelligent agent would scurry out onto the Web, compare university rankings such as The U.S. News and World Report or the BusinessWeek Guide to the Best Business Schools, and return a list of names. The intelligent agent would then fetch the university applications and assorted financial aid information for the top five graduate programs.

Some of the traditional skills of librarianship--thesaurus construction, metadata design, and information organization--dovetail with this next stage of Web development. Librarians have the skills that computer scientists, entrepreneurs, and others are looking for when trying to envision the Semantic Web. However, fruitful exchange between these various communities depends on communication.

Commonalities exist--as do…