First - here is what the page looks like

Professor James A. Hendler

Position:

Full Professor, 
Dept. of Computer Science, 
 UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies ,
 Institute for Systems Research, 
and  Dept. of Electrical Engineering 
University of Maryland at College Park
Acting Head, Advanced Information Technology Laboratory 
Head, ParalleL Understanding Systems  Laboratory
Head, Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory

E-mail

Address/Phone:

Dept. of Computer Science
A.V. Williams Bldg.
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742 USA
Phone: (301) 405-2662,  Fax: (301) 405-6707
And here is what the computer actually sees in HTML:

First comes the definition of the page title in the "head" of the file 


<HTML>
<HEAD>

<TITLE>Prof. James A. Hendler</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>

Then the image and some affiliation information 



<IMG SRC="http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler/hendler.gif" ALIGN="LEFT"
WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=240>

<H1>
Professor James A. Hendler
</H1>
<H3>Position:</H3>
<PRE>
Full Professor, <A HREF="http://www.cs.umd.edu">
Dept. of Computer Science</A>, 
<A HREF="http://www.umiacs.umd.edu"> UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies </A>,
<A HREF="http://www.isr.umd.edu"> Institute for Systems Research</A>, 
and <A HREF="http://www.ee.umd.edu"> Dept. of Electrical Engineering </A>
University of Maryland at College Park
</UL>
Acting Head, <A HREF="/users/hendler/AITL/index.html">Advanced Information Technology Laboratory</A> 
Head, <A HREF="/projects/plus/plus.html">ParalleL Understanding Systems  Laboratory</A>
Head, <A HREF="/projects/amrl/index.html">Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory</A> 
</PRE>




 And then the contact information (email, surface mail, phone, etc.)  


<a href="mailto:hendler@cs.umd.edu"> <H3>E-mail</H3> </a>


<H3>Address/Phone:</H3>
<PRE>
Dept. of Computer Science
A.V. Williams Bldg.
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742 USA
Phone: (301) 405-2662,  Fax: (301) 405-6707
</PRE>






 Semantic web issues 


 The critical thing to note about this page is that although the HTML form looks very "computery," there is no real content in the markup tags.  The tags all tell the computer how to  display  the information, but they do not tell the computer what it means in any real way.  Thus, the information that Dr. Hendler works at the University of Maryland is something you, as a smart human, can figure out from the affiliation information. The fact that Dr. Hendler is male is harder to tell, you must either know "James" is typically a male name, or you can look at the picture and tell by the beard (or baldness) that this is not a woman.


 The goal of the Semantic Web is to make it possible for the computer to be told that sort of information in a way that makes sense to the machine, not necessarily to the human.








 Return to  example description.

 Go on to  Step 2