Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
ward to an Internet where not only humans, but also machines (that is,
the computers used to access the web), would be able to understand its
content.
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If machines could understand the Internet, its power to en-
able the sharing of knowledge would be greatly enhanced. The problem,
as Berners-Lee saw it, was that people “go to search engines and they
ask a question and the search engine gives these stupid answers. It has
read a large proportion of the pages on the entire Web . . . but it doesn't
understand any of them. It tries to answer the question on that basis.
Obviously you get pretty unpredictable results.”
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The solution he pro-
posed was a “Semantic Web,” in which the Internet would be written
in a common, extensible, machine-understandable language. Berners-
Lee imagined an Internet in which not only documents, but also data,
would exist in a standardized format that would allow links (an HTML
equivalent for data). “The Semantic Web,” Berners-Lee believed, “will
enable better data integration by allowing everyone who puts individual
items of data on the Web to link them with other pieces of data using
standard formats.” Signifi cantly, he took his fi rst example from the life
sciences:
To appreciate the need for better data integration, compare the
enormous volume of experimental data produced in commercial
and academic drug discovery laboratories around the world, as
against the stagnant pace of drug discovery. While market and
regulatory factors play a role here, life science researchers are
coming to the conclusion that in many cases no single lab, no
single library, no single genomic data repository contains the in-
formation necessary to discover new drugs. Rather, the informa-
tion necessary to understand the complex interactions between
diseases, biological processes in the human body, and the vast
array of chemical agents is spread out across the world in a
myriad of databases, spreadsheets, and documents.
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In particular, Berners-Lee advocated RDF (Resource Description
Framework) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) for standardizing
data and connecting sources to one another. RDF is a set of specifi ca-
tions, or a “metadata model,” that is used to label web pages with meta-
data. In other words, it aims to provide a common, cross-platform way
of labeling web pages with information about their content. Because
RDF format and terms are tightly controlled, these labels can be “under-
stood” by a computer and can be processed and passed around between
