1. The Semantic Web: What, Why, and How? Ann Wrightson Principal Consultant, alphaXML Ltd ann.wrightson@alphaxml.com

2. http://www.alphaxml.com The Semantic Web What is it? Why is it relevant? How to find out about it?

3. http://www.alphaxml.com What is the Semantic Web? A question often asked! 3 aspects… Visions Requirements Technologies … and numerous definitions and descriptions.

4. The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users. Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila Scientific American, May 2001

5. …technologies for enabling machines to make more sense of the Web, with the result of making the Web more useful for humans. Edd Dumbill on XML.com (O'Reilly, November 2000)

6. The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way, that it can be used by machines - not just for display purposes, but for using it in various applications. Welcome page of semanticweb.org

7. The Semantic Web is a Web that includes documents, or portions of documents, describing explicit relationships between things and containing semantic information intended for automated processing by our machines. SWAGs clear view

8. http://www.alphaxml.com Semantic Web technologies Structure and presentation XML, XSL, XML Schema Indexing, ontology, concept analysis RDF/RDFS, Topic Maps DAML/OIL Functional metadata Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery … and this is just a small sample.

9. http://www.alphaxml.com Why is the Semantic Web relevant? e-Government shares the core vision – the Web being more useful for humans Semantic Web technologies extend and generalize existing capabilities in Government The infrastructure technology can follow and support this vision … some past visions were less lucky

10. http://www.alphaxml.com How to find out about the Semantic Web Diffuse project http://www.diffuse.org IST Semantic Web Technologies Workshop, Luxembourg, 22nd & 23 rd November 2000 http://www.diffuse.org/S-Web.html W3C Semantic Web Activity http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ Semanticweb.org http://www.semanticweb.org