“The established system of journals for communicating the results of scientific research is already being challenged by the existence of the web. But we are only in the early days of a new Internet revolution, one which will have a deeper and more disruptive impact on scientific, and other, web publishing, and have profound implications for the web itself. An emerging successor to the web, the Semantic Web, will likely profoundly change the very nature of how scientific knowledge is produced and shared, in ways that we can now barely imagine.” – Nature, 2001
Information
The Web has established itself as one of the most important new tools available to scientists. Equipped with semantic technologies, it offers an entire spectrum of new opportunities for researchers and other scientists.
Chemical Semantics, Inc. is a start-up devoted to bringing the semantic web to chemistry and biochemistry. Our goal at Chemical Semantics, Inc. is to employ semantic methods in computational chemistry for the better dissemination of data.
The Semantic Web, with its power of categorizing and systematizing data, can revolutionize the field of computational chemistry. Today, most scientific data is scattered around the Web across a multitude of publisher sites of limited if not completely restricted access. This means that such data, being absent from search engines and often available only for significant amounts of money, remains inaccessible for the global scientific community. Moreover, due to the diversity and incompatibility of data sources, finding relevant results and obtaining new knowledge is a cumbersome process requiring manual labor on the part of the user. Many opportunities are lost due to the chaotic nature of this data.
The semantic web is referred to as Web 3.0, the Web of Data, or the Web Full of Meaning. It does not replace the existing World Wide Web but augments it, placing data on the web in a structured form such that the data has “meaning” and computers can understand it.
W3C’s Semantic Web Activity is part of the broader Data Activity with a mandate to build the Web of Data.