Information technology managers are familiar with the concept of the Semantic Web, even if they haven't heard the name before. The Semantic Web is about giving users the ability to manipulate, connect and associate Web resources in new and powerful ways. It's a capability similar to that of the corporate workhorse, the rela-tional database. The Semantic Web is about taking the relational database and "webbing it," as Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, described it at a recent forum of the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va. The Semantic Web will allow businesses to manipulate external, heterogeneous Web data in much the same way they do internally, he says. But its most immediate use may be as a tool to solve data integration problems.
展开▼
