The future of the Web

• Today’s Web is great, but…

  • Users: give them an inch; they want a mile
  • Vicious (virtuous?) cycle of automation

• Right now most Web content is human-readable

  • “04 05 2002”: part number? birthdate? price?
  • Possibilities for automation are limited

• Screen scraping: pre-interpreting pieces of Web content for use by scripts

• Semantic Web: make Web content machine-readable in the first place

Notes: