Earliest use of the term “Semantic Web”??
I was recently asked by a reporter about when the term “Semantic Web” was first used. I gave the usual answer - that it had been mentioned in “Weaving the Web” (1999) and that the usual “academic” citation was the Scientific American article (2001), but I know that some folks were using it well before that. I’ve tried wandering around some old stuff I have (early meta-content format and RDF stuff) without much success - so I thought I’d take a page out of Dan Connolly’s book (err blog) and offer 100 point bounty to whoever can come up with the earliest ref - I’d particularly like something where it appeared in writing, but will take what I can get
thanks
Jim Hendler
December 27th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Here’s my entry…
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/when-did-the-semantic-web-enter-our-lexicon/
December 27th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Maybe, but someone reminded me that Tim Finin had recently blogged on this issue and mentioned a design document from Tim BL from 1997, and then someone el;se pointed me at TIm’s talk from the first WWW conference where he mentioned semantics and the Web (1994) in the same sentence (I had done same around 95). So where “Semantics and the Web” morphed into “Semantic Web” is yet to be resolved - but it clearly seems to be from earlier than 99 or 01.
December 27th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
(oops, Tim’s reply came in while I was blogging my response above — Tim, my apologies for somehow missing your blog on this)
December 27th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
I remember arriving at W3C MIT late summer 1999, and I think in Oct/Nov that year contrib’d to a draft of the charter for a “Semantic Web Activity” building on the previous “Metadata Activity” that gave us RDF. So the phrase was already in use in the corridors of MIT in last months of 1999. It’s from before my time.
The key reference at the time was http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html and that doesn’t seem to have been edited recently, if the CVS ID in there is reliable. It mentions “Semantic Web” in the title.
The phrase was also used by a russian chap whose name escapes me, possibly earlier (1997 or so). It was the same basic concept but I think an independent usage. Sadly he died some while ago, … I think I put an archive of his page in the www-archive@w3.org list somewhere. I can’t get to google or yahoo search right now so I’ll give up by now. I think the domain might have been lucifer.org or .com, not sure.
I also recall ILRT folk from the DESIRE project had a poster at WWW 2000 with “Semantic Web” in it, though them was less machine reasoning, and more Metadata, human cataloguing of Web pages.
The WWW94 slides from TimBL that we mutated into the SWAD-Europe t-shirt I think might have mentioned Semantics, … but not not SemWeb. I don’t have link to hand tho…
December 27th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
Here is a mention of Semantic Web from 199 in Engineering Village http://www.engineeringvillage2.com/controller/servlet/Controller?CID=blogDocument&MID=inspec_base904552126&DATABASE=ins
December 27th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
Here is a mention of Semantic Web from 1993 in Engineering Village http://www.engineeringvillage2.com/controller/servlet/Controller?CID=blogDocument&MID=inspec_base904552126&DATABASE=ins
December 27th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
What about this one: F. H. George , Epistemology and the Problem of Perception. In: Mind, New Series, Vol. 66, No. 264. (Oct., 1957), pp. 491-506, with “semantic web” mentioned on page 500. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-4423%28195710%292%3A66%3A264%3C491%3AEATPOP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4
December 28th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
OK I found the 1997 reference to a recognisably modern usage of “Semantic Web”,
http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/articles/SemanticWeb.html
I made an archival copy of this 5 years ago,
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2001Nov/0090.html see notes there.
Semantic Web vision paper © 1997 Alexander Chislenko. - Version 0.28 - 29 June, 1997
“”"This document describes my vision of semantic/content-aware/intelligent Web, and its development from simple meta-tag processing to globally distributed AI services. The text is gradually taking shape while I am collecting thoughts and studying the resources.
The Web is probably the richest information repository in human history, but most of its information is passive and unstructured. The Web doesn’t know what it carries and for what purpose, and the users cannot specify what they want from it. There are some sites that use structured information storage and queries, but they are just little islands of order in the chaotic sea of information, not communicating to each other.
Since 1995, there started appearing various proposals for meta-data representation and communication standards, and other services and tools that may eventually merge into the global Semantic Web. Hopefully, in the next few years we will see universal adoption of open standards for representation and sharing of meta-information. “”"
I don’t believe there’s any causal connection between his usage of “Semantic Web” and the phrase at W3C (tho TimBL et al may want to correct me on that). This 1997 paper does a good job of citing contributions from various direction: the work on XML, MCF, Dublin Core, SHOE, and various other systems which led to the technologies we call “Semantic Web” today.
Dan
December 29th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
The earliest TimBL/W3C reference I’ve spotted is from the 4th WWW Conference in Boston, June 1995: W3C and the Future.
January 2nd, 2007 at 9:02 pm
The reference that Dan Brickley is quoting too contains Semantic Web since the first edit “Wed Oct 14 20:17:13 1998 UTC”
March 14th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
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