The team pushed like hell to get the sled going, jumped on and then focused on keeping it from derailing under its own velocity.

Of course, the "sled" stayed on track as the Web adoption exploded throughout the 1990s, fundamentally altering how we use and exchange information.

Today, computer researchers are "running like hell" next to the Web's next bobsled, the Semantic Web. This phase could truly enable robots to do our bidding, leaps and bounds beyond the bots and agents of today -- and not just on the Web either.

But the prediction has also ignited a new debate within the scientific community.

Berners-Lee, the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and other researchers proclaim that this new form of Web content "will unleash a revolution of new possibilities."

In an article published in the May issue of Scientific American magazine entitled "The Semantic Web", Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila write:

"The Semantic Web will enable machines to comprehend semantic documents and data, not human speech and writings."

A truly amazing era of software agents, greatly facilitated by semantic content and the use of artificial intelligence could be about to dawn, they argue. The authors lay out some of the underpinnings of organizing the language of this next Web revolution.

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The article has also renewed a debate among scientists over the use of the term itself, as well as the promise of robotics on the Web. Is the Semantic Web that close to breakthrough, similar to where the original Web was in 1991?

Or is it closer to where detractors say it is: like early forms of hypertext in 1965 -- a long way off from actual widespread adoption.

"AI technology has also been around since the 1960s, and it feels to some of us that new approaches are beginning to address the needs of the Web," says Hendler, a professor and head of the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory and the Advanced Information Technology Laboratory at the University of Maryland.

"And just as hypertext needed a new model to make it to the Web, a combination of AI researchers and Web developers are beginning to converge on new models of how AI ideas can come to the Web," he told atNewYork in an interview.

Prof. Hendler, one of the authors of the article, is also the chief scientist at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is a leading authority on robotics research and the uses of artificial intelligence.

In a paper that appeared in IEEE Intelligent Systems Journal, Hendler wrote of the Semantic Web: "I predict that in the next few years virtually every company, university, government agency or ad hoc interest group will want their Web resources linked to (Semantic Web) content -- because of the many powerful tools that will be available for using it."

But Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a research scientist with New York University's Center for Advanced Technology, says the promise of the Semantic Web is too much of a leap for where much of the research is, not to mention the question of standards in coding data to speak to other data.

"I don't think the idea is ill-advised. I just think that maybe they've gone a little overboard in getting people excited (and have) over sold it as something it can't be," says Wardrip-Fruin.

He argues that the term is a more sexy way for selling a scaled-up database.

"People want to know what's the next Web, and what's the next thing for my database. But you're not going to get a cover article in Scientific American by saying 'I've got this cool way of making databases talk to each other,'" he says.

"What they're arguing for is a scaling up of databases by having this distinct ability (among Web pages) to agree on what the database fields mean. But let's not call that the Semantic Web."

Of course, the W3C Semantic Web Activity site http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ has been bubbling for years now; and the article is actually an enhanced version of Berners-Lee's 1999 book "Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor."

The article discusses two important technologies for the Semantic Web that are already in place: eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which "lets everyone create their own tags -- hidden labels such as or that annotate Web pages or sections of text on a page."

RDF helps express meaning in sets of triples, "each triple being rather like the subject, verb and object of an elementary sentence" (which has English majors gloating on computer and technology discussion boards). The collections of those RDFs, called data ontologies, are where the actual "understanding" of the semantic data is facilitated, the authors explain.

"We believe the Semantic Web will allow small groups of humans to create common terminologies, and then use the new technologies to let the machines link them together -- and that's where the real power will come from," Hendler tells atNewYork.

"My hope is that the Semantic Web will be to the Web what the Web was to the Internet - not just an application, but an enabler for a whole new class of applications, approaches and business models."

However, Wardrip-Fruin wants to "rein in some of the hyperbole" about the development of the Semantic Web. "I think the way it has been put forward is shaped by a hunger of what's next after (the first) Web."

For example, one of the problems he has with developing data ontology is that the machine-readable information it could lead to is really about creating cool Internet applications; just don't lump them in with the Web, which is more about the use of media, he says.

The debate over the issues involved in the term and its uses is also set to continue in New York this coming Monday at the monthly meeting the New York Software Industry Association.

In a first for the region, Prof. Hendler, Wardrip-Fruin and Chris Nelson, Senior Software Architect with IBM, are set to debate the development of the Semantic Web and its applications at the NYSIA monthly meeting. For more details, go to: http://www.nysia.org