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services, XML is a fundamental basis. The simplicity of the format and the
standardization by a neutral body with wide vendor support (the W3C) are
the cornerstones of the success of XML. Nevertheless, as already pointed out
in the discussion of XML Schema, the format only enables syntactic inter-
operability, to a large extent. The meaning of tags cannot be described with
XML as such, and transformation between different XML formats, albeit fa-
cilitated through XSLT and related languages, remains mainly a manual task.
However, the manual deployment of XSLT transformations does not scale to
mediation between possibly hundreds of thousands of different XML formats.
Standardized vocabularies and intelligent technologies, such as the Semantic
Web, promise to tackle these challenges by building on top of XML standards.
In the following chapters, we shall describe these in more detail.
2.4 Summary
In this chapter, we have briefly recapitulated the history of the current Web
and outlined its most substantial developments and success factors. The tra-
ditional Web is based on three main building blocks: global identification of
resources via URIs, a simple client-server-based protocol for persistent pub-
lication of globally accessible data (HTTP), and an easy-to-use language for
creating interlinked hypertext documents (HTML).
Standardization is the key for technologies such as the Web in reaching
their current level of success and interoperability. The World Wide Web con-
sortium (W3C) and other standardization bodies are working towards the
continuous progress of Web-related standards, by controlling accessability and
compliance with basic Web principles.
As we have seen, a first step towards the next generation of the Web and
a more strict separation between content and layout has already been taken
with the introduction of XML and the related family of standards, of which
we have sketched a few. As we shall see in the following chapters, however,
this takes us only halfway towards real machine-processable Web content and
interoperable services. We need to bring back the computer as a device for
computation and assistance to help us deal better with the rapidly growing
amount of information available on the Web.
Note that unlike other documents in the literature, we do not include XML
per se in the “Semantic Web”, but instead consider the family of standards
around XML as an intermediate step towards a real machine-processable Web
infrastructure.
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