Design for Semantic Web (Exclusive Article)

I assume that it may be too early to talk about how the Web will look like when we switch to Semantic Web; but on the other hand, we should consider the fact that the web design industry (though it's hard to give this industry a clear and strict definition) is one of the biggest players on the Internet now. That's why its needs and future is of great importance to the whole online community and has the right to be discussed. What is Semantic Web? How will it change the appearance of the Web? How it will influence web design industry? These are the questions discussed in this article.

1. Semantic Web - What Changes will Mere Users face?

The "To be or not to be" question for Web Designers - the separation of form and content becomes even more actual with the launching of Semantic Web as it presents totally new ways of collecting and representing information.

	" The first step is putting data on the Web in a form that machines can naturally understand, or converting it to that form. This creates what I call a Semantic Web -- a web of data that can be processed directly or indirectly by machines. "Weaving the Web" by Tim Berners-Lee "

The WWW started as and continues to be a special interactive space for sharing documents which are created by humans for humans. It is logical that web page design appeared as just an offspring of print design as the aim was to represent documents. It started with a simple HTMinimaLism Style also known as Academic Style, but soon due to the extremely fast development of technology, web page design departed from the HTML manifestations of Print Design and dove into some richer content representation models, one of the best realizations of which today is Flash technology. Nowadays web design enjoys a large variety of ways to represent information; and these ways have nothing in common with other media. The WWW is recognized now as a totally new media space with its own law and morals. For a long time web design was concentrated on realizing this potential, which can be defined as design for design's sake. Such flame of the industry brought it to a place which is beyond any requirements, standards, or w3c.org specifications. It's became a common situation when you need to setup some software to create a site. No one can decide if it is bad or good... with this I just want to draw even more of your attention to the fact that most of the internet remains unavailable for those who use some of the old technologies, not to mention deaf and blind people.

But the situation changes constantly and to be always on top we need to keep in touch with the latest tendencies. W3C becomes more powerful and influential nowadays. Not only browser vendors are aware of its specifications but average designers as well. We will pass on the opportunity to discuss all the noise produced by designers around each W3C specification and concentrate on the global task of this organization of which there can be no doubt - the creation of the Semantic Web. The main challenge of which will be that it is orientated not for humans only but for machines as well. The technologies which are going to be the basis for it are available for use now, with all the standards from w3c.org: eXtensible Markup Language - XML; Resource Description Framework - RDF; Web Ontology Language - OWL. The Machine-Based Web Agent for Semantic Web is going to be a machine for this environment.

	" Web agents - people or software acting on this (WWW) information space. "Architecture of the World Wide Web", Volume One "

I think that browsers can be considered as predecessors for this kind of Agent, though the latter will differ much from browsers, of course.

The main point of these Agents will be that they will be more personalized than browsers so you will be able to customize them for your unique needs to meet your specific requirements. Besides, due to their ability to communicate with other machine-based agents they will be able to present you the information gathered from different resources as one document. Ideally, you will get a definite answer to any of your questions. It's not a "must" that the answer will be found within only one resource.

Compared to the current situation, it will reduce your efforts on finding the needed information - you won't need to look through the search results like you need to do it with any search engine now. And even more, I assume that humans will not use search engines any more. Though it doesn't mean that search engines will disappear; they will just switch to satisfy machine-based agents' search needs not human ones, and agents will be responsible for filtering the results and presenting you only one but which is of true relevance to your request.

2. WWW Design Vs Semantic Web Design

	" There is an unarticulated war currently raging among those who make web sites... This war is between usability experts and graphic designers. "Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus" Curt Cloninger "

How will this situation affect Design and web design, to be more specific? As WWW is a space of documents it became of great demand to represent these documents in the most comfortable way for human beings first of all. The machines were not taken into consideration and it was a well-taken strategy. But things are going to change with Semantic Web when a user will get a document compiled from different documents by his Web Agent to answer his specific question. So no one is going to look through web sites in search of the needed information it will be Web Agent's job. It will decrease the number of web pages designed for humans as they are not going to visit them any more... All the usability, color schemes, etc. issues will be gone forever. Does it really mean that there won't be websites we've grown accustomed to any more? I don't think so... at least for the next 20 years, approximately... But it will surely change the situation with the web design industry.

Machine-oriented Web will be stricter, paying more attention to the standards and usability issues as they are going to be important for machines though criteria of usability will change, of course. But it will be almost impossible to find any real design masterpiece with this part of the Web. For aesthetical needs, people will probably use Human-oriented Web with a large amount of graphical works of high quality though the amount will decrease for sure compared to the current situation. Not only because of the fact that the number of human web-surfers will lower (users will get their answers delivered by Web Agents which will accomplish surf job) but due to the tendency of the complication of the rich-content technologies as well. So the "war" between usability and graphic will result in global separation of Human and Machine oriented Web - nobody will get the kingdom and both at the same time establishing the kingdoms of their own. This doesn't mean, however, that these Webs will be separated completely. Though to talk about the ways they will be connected is almost impossible as the fact of separation is not shared between the online community and its key-figures like w3c.org. The fact of separation is only my assumption - an effort to offer a possible scenario.

Web Designers will get even more work developing pages not only for humans but for machines as well. If setting up a page for machines was not a very complicated task in the past, it will be with the XML environment, which is not to hard to master. Search Engine Optimization can be considered as the beginning of this part of future design work - it's a well known fact that really good design implies not only good graphic design but good coding and taking into account that the site is going to get good positions with Search Engines. At the same time, the graphic part of the job will require more skills and investments, which will influence the price of these services. Such situation will probably result in decreasing the amount of web design companies and essentially increasing the quality of those who will stay with the market.

3. More Users Go Off (-Line)?

	" Business blogs are part of the cutting edge of website development. Displaying their value for marketing, public relations, adding fresh new content, maintaining theme relevance, and overall search engine optimization, blogs can play a powerful role for most traditional websites. " Business Blogs As A Powerful Linking Strategy" Wayne Hurlbert "

One of the most popular features of the Web was and continues to be its accessibility. Anybody can release his information and to do this he won't need some special knowledge. This option was first realized with the concept of Home Pages - a quick and easy opportunity to share your thoughts, ideas and pictures, music and graphics with the online community.

"Home Page" Design hasn't managed to escape the design split into graphic and usability tendencies. Currently, we have on the one hand lots of home pages with impressive non-traditional design, which are the results of brave experiments with the Web and on the other hand, lots of Home Pages with extremely simple HTMinimaLism which targets content not design experiments. The number of content-orientated home pages is constantly decreasing now. The reason of it is that the technologies used to publish even simple web-pages become more sophisticated from day to day (it's not a simple task to pass through validation at w3c.org any more). Besides, more effective content-sharing technologies have appeared which are not overloaded with all that tag-jazz but allow the public access to almost any kind of content fast and easy without any special knowledge. I mean blogs, of course. It's not a brand-new technology, but it became popular only last year, so though it has not realized its potential yet, we can guess about its potential only.

The need for making public some of your experience will not disappear with the launching of Semantic Web, as it roots in the deepest layers of human psychology. But what will it look like? If we take a look at blogs, we probably won't see some special design there; and a blog itself proves that sometimes the aim is to share content, not to experiment with design. I think that by developing more sophisticated blog technologies and gradually switching to the Semantic Web, Machine Web Agents will be implemented with something like blog-diary service. It's rather early to talk about how it will look and work, but some basic features of this technology can be seen now. Probably it will be a diary that is very flexible and having lots of variants on setting up access rights to its different types for different types of users (not users actually but their Web Agents ;).

	" Usability is a critical component of design. But, as so many have pointed out, it is only a component. "The End of Usability Culture, Redux" Dirk Knemeyer "

The method of making public personal experience will change completely and though it may sound rather pretentious, some of the assumptions about how it will work and look can be made now: Personalized Web Agent will be the universal interface - not to get information but to operate on the Web and share your private experience concerning the complicated access system and all your individual preferences. Forum and blog features will be combined in order to meet the requirements of simplicity, usability, functionality. Design won't be of great value with Semantic Web's new type of "Home Page".

4. Shifts in Web Design Industry

Despite the large amount of optimistic prognosis, I really have doubts about the brilliant future of web design. The key point of being so realistically-pessimistic is developing a totally new media space to meet not only human but machine requirements as well. Though the final aim is to satisfy human needs first of all over optimization of the main functions of the WWW will result in the total change of it. With the growing popularity of RDF, XML, OWL technologies, the WWW is going to be more usability oriented not graphically as machines as a rule do not pay attention to how information is presented from the aesthetical point of view. Looking from nowadays situations, it seems one of two scenarios can become possible.

Scenario #1:

The split in the WWW Design will result in the split of Semantic Web based on usability and machine oriented technologies and the WWW which is going to concentrate on graphical, rich-content methods of information representation but available for humans only. Two webs: the offspring and the ancestor will keep in touch but Semantic Web is going to get the leading role in information supplement and probably the leading role among all other media. The plain old WWW will turn into an asylum for designers from the late 90 th early 2010 th and will become media museums with the death of the last representatives of the "Web Design" generation.

Scenario #2:

There will be no Web split. The usual WWW, overburdened with lots of graphics and not very aware of the standards and usability issues, will disappear as soon as Semantic Web is launched. That doesn't mean though that all the reach-content technologies will disappear with the collapse of the WWW; I'm sure they will continue to develop but within the borders of usual design representation. There will be no need in designing information (please, do not mix graphic design, which is meant to impact the human soul, with a sophisticated or the simplest-you-have-ever-seen images system with an information architecture which is meant to deliver information in the fastest and easiest).

As you may see, none of the scenarios is the lucky one for the web design industry. Though only very rare predictions come true, the web design industry and its apologists should make a really strong move now to integrate impressive graphic design with the new technologies recommended for use by W3C to stop both of the above ways the future may go.

If such a preemptive strike is taken, it will change the face of the web design industry in the next couple of years. As WWW users become more and more educated in web technologies, they will require not a simple or maybe impressive (doesn't matter in this particular case) graphically designed website, but first of all such a site which is able to pass through W3C validation. It will probably decrease the number of companies in the industry as currently some of them are concentrated on impressive design, others on validated code, but very few of them represent the combination of these two approaches in current web design trends.