The Semantic Web
Saturday, November 15, 2008 12:58 am- This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.
“The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand.” (1). Currently, most all content on the web is written for human consumption and understanding. It is currently very, very difficult for software such as search engines to extract from context clues what exactly the page or data it is looking at means, or what the data is related to. Various efforts have been underway to deal with this problem so that computers can better organize and information on the web. These efforts include RDF, which is a essentially a markup language designed for the purposes of building out the semantic web. The purpose of RDF is to allow for a “formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.” (2).
The reason that the development of the semantic web is so useful and cool is that it will allow for much, much, much easier use of the myriad amounts of data published on the web. As I mentioned above, the issue that computers have when looking for information on the web is that they cannot tell what context the data is. A computer may see tabular data in an HTML page, but it has no idea if the data is baseball stats or a listing of physical constants on a physic teacher’s website. Yes, context can be determined by keywords, but an even better way to define what the data represents is doing so formally using a technology such as RDF. Then, if a company such as Google reads a webpage, it can know exactly what the data presented is, and then provide better search results related to that page. As well, now someone can easily re-use the data for their own purposes, using something akin to Yahoo! Pipes, without depending on the author of the webpage having created an API or RSS feed to share the data. Screen-scraping becomes easy.
Further Reading:
- Microformats
- Comments and links on Slashdot
References
