Networking and Internetworking - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 61

• Ordering topics and CDs over the Web (such as www.amazon.com)
• Recruitment services (such as www.jobserve.com)
• Internet banking
• Online casinos (for gambling)
• Newspapers and news channels
• Online shopping and shopping malls
Berners-Lee invented the well-known terms such as URL, HTML, and
WWW, and these terms are ubiquitous today. Berners-Lee is now the direc-
tor of the World Wide Web Consortium, and this MIT-based organization
sets the software standards for the Web.
2.5 Semantic Web
While the Web keeps growing at an astounding pace, most Web pages
are still designed for human consumption and cannot be processed by
machines. Similarly, while Web search engines help retrieve Web pages,
they do not offer support to interpret the results—for that, human inter-
vention is still required. As the size of search results is often just too big
for humans to interpret, finding relevant information on the Web is not
as easy as we would desire. The existing Web has evolved as a medium
for information exchange among people, rather than machines. As a
consequence, the semantic content, that is, the meaning of the informa-
tion on a Web page, is coded in a way that is accessible to human beings
only. Today's Web may be defined as the Syntactic Web , where informa-
tion presentation is carried out by computers, and the interpretation and
identification of relevant information is delegated to human beings. With
the volume of available digital data growing at an exponential rate, it is
becoming virtually impossible for human beings to manage the complex-
ity and volume of the available information. This phenomenon, often
referred to as information overload , poses a serious threat to the continued
usefulness of today's Web.
As the volume of Web resources grows exponentially, researchers from
industry, government, and academia are now exploring the possibility
of creating a Semantic Web in which meaning is made explicit, allowing
machines to process and integrate Web resources intelligently. Biologists
use a well-defined taxonomy, the Linnaean taxonomy, adopted and shared
by most of the scientific community worldwide. Likewise, computer sci-
entists are looking for a similar model to help structure Web content. In
2001, T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, and O. Lassila published a revolutionary