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Issue #10
August 2003
By Dennis Merritt
AI - The art and science of making computers do interesting things that
are not in their nature.
As always, feedback is welcome. dennis@ddj.com
Semantic Web
Clearly an interesting thing to do with the Internet is to create robots that
can search out answers to questions. Suppose you wanted to find out who was
the editor of the Dr. Dobb's AI Expert Newsletter. Any human could answer that
question in a minute or less by finding the DDJ Web site, clicking on newsletters
and scanning down for the AI Expert description.
How would we write a program that could answer the same question? Well it wouldn't
be easy. It would require using natural language understanding software to scan
the document looking for words that might imply it found the editor, assuming
it was able to figure out which page to look at in the first place.
It is a difficult program to write because the Web is designed for human use,
not machine use.
As with many programming tasks, the problem can be made much simpler with
a better choice of data structures. If, in addition to free-form text, a Web
site had formal specifications of the content, then writing a program to answer
the question becomes almost trivial.
For example, if there was some XML like this at the DDJ Web site:
<site name=ddj>
..
