Thursday, January 31, 2008

Web 3.0 as in Automation?

I often wonder what kind of automation will make it possible for the Semantic Web. I know there needs to be an automated web browser (or something similar), but what would it look like? The solution could look something like Automatic Character Switch (ACtS), which is a strategy and a philosophy rather than a standard, meaning community moderators can independently implement their own ACtS methods. Similar to AJAX, ACtS is invoked only when it is necessary; that is, only when a web space is connected to a community.

So what is ACtS? According to Yihong Ding, ACtS only allows different communities to recognize whatever they can identify from a web space. A web user can set up a local web spce that stores his web resources. When he subscribes to a new web community, he uploads his local web space to the site while the site customizes its resources based on the community specifications. ACts begins with a user's subscribing a web space to a community. The community server thus performs a community-sensitive resource identification procedure to categorize (information retrieval) and annotate (semantic annotation) public resources stored in the web space. Thus, the local web space creates a community-specific view over its resources, which composes a community-specific sub-space. But ACtS is only a theory. For it to be realized, there needs to be two premises:

(1) A uniform representation - Web spaces similar to what is on Web 1.0. This requires advancement on HTML encoding. In particular, this means independent HTML encoding of individual web resources.

(2) Character recognition and casting technology - A combination of information retrieval and semantic annotation methods.

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