IT Week: As head of Southampton University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, can you explain what the semantic web is?

Wendy Hall : It’s the way Tim [Berners-Lee, web pioneer] always intended the web to work. It’s [about] adding meaning to the web so machines can interpret information in web pages. At the moment we have a web of documents, but [the semantic web] is about creating a web of data that we can use so machines can process that data and make sense of the information. It also [involves] the sharing of vocabularies, or ontologies.

Will this kind of semantic web be difficult to achieve?

People think [the logical standards] are difficult to create and must be done from the bottom up, but we don’t have to build huge ones to make it work, it can be done simply. It’s about extending what’s there already – when the web arrived it [seemed like] it wasn’t there one minute and suddenly it was the next, but the semantic web probably won’t feel like that, it’s on a more gradual curve. In about three to five years the sort of complex questions you can’t ask today, you will be able to have answered.

What are the business benefits of the semantic web?

At the moment you cannot get answers to complex questions on the web. If you want to find the cheapest hotel in [a resort] for example you have to go to a travel agent or do a lot of research looking through online documents. With the semantic web, businesses could make their data available on the web with an agreed shared vocabulary – which is at the moment in development – so an agency could write the processes to answer the questions for you. At the moment all this stuff is available in databases. In the future software agents will play a big part in this – it’s about freeing up the data.

Are these developments part of Web 2.0 systems?

No. The semantic web is much more about looking at the standards required to enable us to have a web that machines can understand. A lot of Web 2.0 communities have been bought for large sums of cash, and it is exciting for the communities and is creating new businesses, but it won’t last. The huge prices being paid for these firms are probably not quite as big as the over-inflated prices people paid [in the dot-com boom] but everyone is jumping on the bandwagon [in a similar way].

How will this month’s World Wide Web conference in Edinburgh address the semantic web?

Tim is doing two or three big sessions focusing on [the semantic web]. It’s incredibly important for him, so a major theme will be the next generation of the web. The conference is also about getting speakers who have created or are looking to create businesses capitalising on the semantic web to talk about the business potential. There is huge scope for entrepreneurial activity with the semantic web.