As the Internet and World Wide Web turn ten years old, there is a new form of information sharing evolving from traditional forms of information sharing. As the father of the Web Tim Berners-Lee notes “The old Web shares information among people using documents, whereas the new Semantic Web shares information among computers using data” (Metcalfe 110). Old Web technologies utilized HTML, a programming language which published information for human digestion. This language teases out content from presentation. For the Semantic Web, a new language known as Extensive Markup Language (XML) has been developed which “carefully separates content, presentation, and meaning (semantics) for software consumption” (Metcalfe 110). XML is a meta language that is designed for two main purposes. The first is a means of standardizing software to software data exchanges on the Web. The second is to develop a platform onto which can be woven the meaning of data.
The implications for E-commerce are enormous because removing the human to human connection from many Web or Internet communications allows for greater efficiency, speed, and lower costs due to an increase in computer to computer or software to software communications. We are now in the post-PC era. As such, former platforms like Unix, DOS, Windows, and others have become outmoded in the Internet era. The hypertext Web produced pages in HTML so humans could read them, but Semantic Web produces XML for software to read. Bowstreet is one company that has developed Web Services Architecture (WSA), based on XML and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (Metcalfe 106). The company has used WSA to develop a platform for Internet channel management (ICM) “The company’s Java software enables customers to combine ICM features in highly flexible applications-applications the recompile run time based on directory meta data about customers an
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