The Scenarios for the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web has been a very popular topic in the popluar press and technical and academic resesarch literatures. This promising extension to the current Web has raised a number of expectations. These expectations could be potrayed as three different perspectives of the Semantic Web as follows:[1]

• a universal library, to be readily accessed and used by humans in a variety of information use contexts;
• the backdrop for the work of computational agents completing sophisticated activities on behalf of their human counterparts;
• a method for federating particular knowledge bases and databases to perform anticipated tasks for humans and their agents.

[1] Marshall, C. C. and Shipman, F. M. 2003. Which semantic web?. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Nottingham, UK, August 26 - 30, 2003). HYPERTEXT '03. ACM Press, New York, NY, 57-66.