In his opening keynote at the Twelfth
International World Wide Web conference, the Director of the World
Wide Web Consortium explained how the two main thrusts of the
development of the web do not compete, but can work together.
The Semantic Web project is Tim Berners-Lee's brainchild, seeking
to create a machine processable web. It draws its followers
predominantly from the more research-oriented members of the web
community. The development of Web Services on the other hand has been
largely driven by commercial interests, major players including
Microsoft, IBM and BEA.
In the past there has been the perception that these two avenues
of development were in opposition to each other. Web Services drew
criticism for not respecting the web's existing architecture, and the
Semantic Web project for its aspirational nature, not meeting today's
needs.
Berners-Lee described the two technologies in the context of
system integration: characterizing the Semantic Web as data
integration, and Web Services as program integration. He also
identified areas where the two could work together: discovery
mechanisms such as UDDI and WSDL are ideally placed to be implemented
using semantic web technology; RDF could be sent as a SOAP payload,
remote RDF query and update should use SOAP; semantic web business
rules engines could interact using SOAP.
Web Services meet immediate technology needs, said Berners-Lee,
while the Semantic Web has the potential for future exponential
growth. There are many ways in which the two areas could interact in
the future, and the W3C does not intend to limit their work to one
area or the other.
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