Semantic Web: a seamless web of data in your life
I’ve been interested in the Semantic web concept for quite a while now as I get frustrated with search engines (all of them) sometimes when I’m looking for something random or loosely coupled information where I can’t quite get the exact search string that I’m looking for. So I was interested to read Tim Berners Lee in the Times last week talking about how powerful searches are going to be in the Web 3.0 world of the near future - the Semantic Web
The “semantic web” will enable direct connectivity between much more low-level pieces of information — a written street address and a map, for instance — which in turn will give rise to new services.
It’s about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life.”
I like that. We’re currently surrounded by disconnected islands of data in a sea of information and the semantic web will bridge these all together intelligently. I like the idea that when all this is up and running then web search as we know it now will totally seem mundane by comparison. the machines doing all of the work and interacting to find the best answer seems the best way forward to me.
And Yahoo have announced that they’re going to adopt some key standards of the Semantic Web by including semantic web identifiers for search engines. Identifiers such as tags which are used on many sites at the moment. So that’s going to make tags a whole lot more useful to search engines - and blogs will now show much more relevance in search results.
It’s going to mess up the SEO relevance and page ranking though - and alter the results that most search engines use now - which I think would also hit advertising relevance and revenue. and That’s going to be a heck of a wake up call for them.
What do you think?…
