From Semantic Web (3.0) to Wisdom Web (4.0)
Dr. Mohamad Fauzan Noordin
- Dean, Centre for Postgraduate Studies, International Islamic University Malaysia-
The nature of Web 2.0 was user centred. As a result, enormous data is available and is
increasing at a rapid pace. The data is more of bits and bytes and the knowledge
associated with this data is still unveiled to a huge extent. The main purpose of the data is
the knowledge and hence Web 3.0 aimed at knowledge extraction and means and ways
to extract the knowledge are still being designed and developed. In the area of this
research, Muslim researchers have directed their works towards the availability of digital
resources for Al-Quran and books of Hadith since they form the foundations of Islam.
However, the research done so far has not gone deep into the area of knowledge
representation of Al-Quran and Hadith. The work under progress looks into development
of knowledge representation formalism for Al-Quran using the logical base as it is
expressive in nature and has proven successful previously even in complex situations. The
current work also looks into enhancing the logical based indexing for better retrieval. It also
aims at the development of a query and question-answering system based on the logical
formalism and enhanced indexing developed. As researchers are still looking into Web
3.0, the research community has started to look forward towards the Web 4.0 structure.
Tim Berners Lee and others aim Web 4.0 towards a web with ultra-intelligent electronic
agents, which seems more of an improvement to the concepts of Web 3.0. The current
research and others make us believe that the Web 4.0 should be more of a Wisdom Web
rather than the technical intelligent agent based. The researchers looking towards 4.0 in
this direction consider the source of wisdom to be Al-Quran & Hadith. The Wisdom Web
will be having a very important significance as everything on the Web fits human nature
rather than any sort of data. It is anticipated that it will provide a boost to the socioeconomic conditions of the society as it will be more wisdom based than anything else.