Its All About The Semantics

Semantic Web

It can be a tortuous journey crawling through the endless interwebs of information in cyberspace. This is because the internet and World Wide Web is fairly young, still in its infancy. The search engines we use can sometimes struggle with our search queries because it quite doesn't understand our homo sapien thought process. It cannot tell the difference between Paris Hilton and the Hilton in Paris. This is because it bases its search on keywords and not the meaning behind the words. What if search engines and the interwebs were smarter? What if it understood the natural language process that we use? Curtains open, music plays, and drum roll, let me introduce to you the notion of Web 3.0, aka the Semantic Web.

By using a set of standards, the World Wide Web would become one big database. But this is a large undertaking because the entire World Wide Web would need to be re annotated. The metadata on each page would need to be updated following the specifications of RDF, OWL, and XML, to name a few. The goal is to create a more intelligent Web. One that is understandable by computers on the same level as it is for humans. One that would not only look at key words, but take into consideration the relevance and context of other words associated with the key words. The Semantic Web is about using a common format so that data can be combined as well as integrated. It is also about how data correlates to real world objects. One that could serve as a personal assistant of sorts. Today, if you wanted to grab dinner and a movie, you would search for your movies options by location, time, and theatre company. Then you would search for the various restaurants in your area that may be of interest any maybe sort them by customer ratings. Only after you visited a number of sites would you be able to make your decision. In a Web 3.0 solution, you would be able to ask for a dinner and movie recommendation in your vicinity. The search engine would analyze your query, search for all possible answers, and then organize the results for you. It would be as if you asked 'someone' else to do it for you and then come back with the answers. It would be able to take complex queries, rationalize them, and returning an ordered set of results.

Recently in the headlines is a government site, Recovery.gov. The Obama administration is using these next generation web technologies to allow the general public view how the economic stimulus of about $800 billion dollars is being spent. A quick overview blurb of the project can be seen here.