Introduction - Enabling Semantic Web Services: The Web Service Modeling Ontology - page 2

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Introduction
More than three decades ago, the information revolution started with
ARPANet, the so-called grandfather of the Internet, with originally only four
connected servers. The idea of developing this network came from the need
for scientists to communicate with one another independently of geographi-
cal barriers. Just as the telephone allowed them to communicate their words,
ARPANet enabled them to freely transfer data or use remote computers.
While the Internet grew continuously, several useful developments such as
email, FTP, and TELNET took place within ARPANet. However, in addition
to such developments, it took another revolutionary idea to cause the real take-
off. Only in the early 1990s, when the Internet as such and communication
via email, file transfer via FTP, and remote server access via TELNET were
already fairly well established in the scientific community, did a young scien-
tist working at CERN spark the next revolution. Tim Berners-Lee combined
several innovative ideas into a distributed hypertext system, and provided
building blocks such as a simple underlying protocol (HTTP), unique identi-
fiers for linkable information (URIs), and an easy-to-use language (HTML) to
create human-readable, interlinked documents accessible all across the Inter-
net. And with these monumental technological foundations the World Wide
Web was born.
The idea of allowing persistent publication of information on your server,
which would be publicly available via an open protocol, combined with the
possibility of linking this information arbitrarily, encouraged people to publish
enormous amounts of data making the Web the biggest data collection ever:
Google alone has more than 9 700 000 000 Web pages indexed at the time of
publication, and is, of course, rapidly growing.
Facing this unmanageable amount of data, but also recognizing its big po-
tential, it was again Tim Berners-Lee hwo coined the name for his vision of
the next generation of the Web, the Semantic Web . His vision proposed to
enrich the human-readable data on the Web with machine-readable annota-
tions thereby allowing the Web to evolve into the world's biggest database:
“If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge