The Future, The Semantic Web

Recently at work I came across a young colleague who had done some work during his bachelors on semantic web and I kind of got involved in that discussion. During that conversation a few more folks joined in and I realized that not many were aware of the our current "not-so-semantic web". Hence this became the topic of my today's blog.

So what exactly is the "semantic web"? Let me try and explain with an example. Suppose I am wanting to buy a camcorder and I did research on the web for the camcorders and I come across the following things from different sites:

•  Model: DC220, Manufacturer : Cannon, Price: $449, Rating : 7/10, Really small and easy to hold/operate, good batter power but menu systems on the touchpanel are a little clumsy to operate.

• Checked out the latest Panasonic PV-GS300 and it has a really nice night shot feature, and I would rate it among the best camcorder. So go for it!

Even if I knew little or nothing about camcorders and its features, I can make a pretty good idea of what the web sites are talking about and what they mean when they say the things they say. But if a piece of software went through the exact same pieces of text mentioned above, it will really have problems in understanding the really straightforward language concepts.

This brings us to the main concern, people are really good at "interpreting" meaning, or semantics, from written language, and software is pretty bad at it. So when search engines go through blobs and blobs of text, what is missing is some standardized way for us to mark up our web content to help the software recognize the semantics of the content. If it is possible to mark up our web content in some way to associate the correct semantics of the page, then it helps us  move the Web beyond the current index/search/read paradigm that we are stuck with currently. And that is what is meant by "Semantic Web", on which currently there is a huge amount of research going on.