News: Data-Driven Enterprise--Slouching toward the Semantic Web

The concept's potential is certainly attractive. "Suppose you could link Environmental Protection Agency data about the chemicals found in some location to a database of chemical effects on various genes to PubMed articles on those genes and the diseases that affect them," says James Hendler, director of the University of Maryland's Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery (http://zaphod.mindlab.umd.edu:16080/JIKD/), and one of the Semantic Web's pioneers. "You might be able to realize that the rise in, say, Burkitt's Lymphoma was likely to be linked to the dumping of some chemical. In short, the ability to link texts to databases, to data sets, et cetera, could lead to information linking well beyond current capabilities."