Toward a Smarter Web With the growth of the Web, many people have come to view the Interne

Toward a Smarter Web

With the growth of the Web, many people have come to view the Internet as a handy source of information. Yet there are limits to the depth of the data that can be mined from cyberspace.

Ask a search engine that runs on your favorite Web browser to tell you where you can buy a red convertible in Miami for under $35,000. Such a car does exist. But getting the answer online is a daunting task that often entails multiple searches.

Now the Web's creator, British-born Tim Berners-Lee, has set about solving such problems. The goal is to provide for the automatic exchange of any type of content between many kinds of software programs, applications and databases and, when appropriate, between people.

He compares the online situation today with the way things were when the first Web sites were launched almost exactly a decade ago. Before the Web created a common programming language. accessing each database required users to learn a special set of internal rules, which could be quite arcane. Consequently, only computer mavens bothered to get Internet addresses.

But after Berners-Lee developed the "hypertext" system of linking documents and other information with the now-familiar Web tags, his creation became the fastest-growing data gathering system in human history, reaching 30 million active domain names in 2001.

Now, history is repeating itself. Berners-Lee has dubbed his new project "the semantic Web." While the coding concepts are complex, the idea behind them is simple enough. The semantic Web would allow programs to browse the Internet and trade data without any direct human intervention. In theory, that could turn all of cyberspace into a unified interactive computer.

"The semantic Web represents a long-term goal to change and improve the way in which computers and users work together, as well as the way computers work with other computers," Berners-Lee told a Harvard graduate school seminar the other day. "Instead of searching for words, we search for concepts that tie things together."

Berners-Lee and his programming team seek to provide "intelligent agents" the capacity to understand the underlying meaning — the "semantics" — of the information they roam through to make their searches more meaningful and efficient.

The initial step is to create standards that allow users to add descriptive tags, or "metadata," to Web content, making it easier to pinpoint exactly what you're looking for. Next, methods will need to be found to enable different programs to relate to metadata from various Web sites. Finally, programmers will be able to craft applications that infer vital facts from the ones they've been given. And finding that convertible will be much easier.

A Smarter Web is meant to be

A．a faster search engine.

B．a semantic Web.

C．a hypertext system.

D．a metadata.