End users also start days with Internet. This has become the scenario. One of the most burgeoning needs of computer science research is research on web technologies and intelligence, as that has become one of the most emerging nowadays. A big area of other research areas like e-marketing, e-learning, e-governance, searching technologies, et cetera will be highly benefited if intelligence can be added to the Web. The objective of this chapter is to create a clear understanding of Web technology research and highlight the ways to implement Semantic Web. The chapter also discusses the tools and technologies that can be applied to develop Semantic Web. This new research area needs enough care as sometimes data are open. Thus, software engineering issues are also a focus.
TopWeb Technology Evolution
Before starting the discussion it is better to introduce the key person behind the web and semantic web. The person is (Professor, Knight) Mr. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of WWW. He proposed W3 on 1989. The journey of web started from that point onwards. In 2001 he proposed web of data, semantic web. This is 10th year of semantic web theory. The theory itself has got some developments and different application areas are also in reality.
One more person we suppose to refer with honor is Mr. Nova Spivack, the web futurist, Entrepreneur. According to Mr. N. Spivack, semantic web is the next generation of web and will be in existence within 2010 to 2020. According to Mr. Spivac we already have started this journey.
Web 0.5: Journey started with Mr. Lee’s vision. The concept of hyperlink came in the picture. Different so called static sites became the reality. This journey used to work with FTP, GOPHER, or say for example USENET. People became familiar with terminologies like HTTP, URI, HTML, and Web Server. Only information sites were on the scene without any standard technology, protocols and tools. Murugesan(2010) described the same as a summary.
Web 1.0: We got the flavor of Web 1.0 from 1990 to 2000. Starting from small organization to government bodies tried to publish information on the web. Some standards, protocols were in place on the peak moment of web 1.0 (considered within 1993 to 1996). Some accomplishments within these phases are Altavista being a small search engine, Yahoo being a small portal. This was the web with cognition. References Murugesan(2010) and Weber, Rech (2010) both mentioned this web with cognition and sites for publishing information only.
Web 1.5: We got some over web 1.0 and did not restrict ourselves to web 1.0. Developers added some dynamic features to web 1.0. This can be considered as a basic development of web 1.0 with tools and technology. Commercialization came in this phase with sites like Amazon, eBay etc. Microsoft launched Internet Explorer within this phase itself. We got something called CMS (Content Management System) with the advent of server side scripting languages and programming tools like Javascript, Java Applets, CGI etc.