Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for a Semantic Web has been The Next Big Thing for a long time now. Indeed it’s become almost mythical, like Moby Dick.
In a nutshell, the Semantic Web is about machines talking to machines.
It’s about making the Web more ‘intelligent’, or as Berners-Lee himself described it: computers “analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.”
At other times, Berners-Lee has described it as “the application of weblike design to data” - for example designing for re-use of information.
So when will the Semantic Web arrive?
The building blocks are here already: RDF, OWL, microformats are a few of them. But it will take some time to annotate the world’s information and then to capture personal information in the right way.
Some companies, such as Hakia and Powerset and AdaptiveBlue, are actively trying to implement the Semantic Web.
Photo by clix.
bam on September 11th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Look at the future of semantic web here.