Chris Bunk.com

The Semantic Web is a grand vision of what the World Wide Web should evolve into, as scene by people like Tim Berners-Lee. Currently the internet is mostly a medium for sharing data in a human readable form using HTML and related languages. The vision of the semantic web is to not only share data in a readable form but also in a way where a machine can understand the semantics, or meaning of the data. For an example of the type of the things you can do in a semantic web world read this article. This vision has a ways to go but technologies like RSS and Web Services is a step in the right direction.

The technologies and standards that support this vision such as RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL, etc. are for the most part available today (but not mature). The Semantic Web, however, will not come to full fruition for quite some time because it requires restructuring all of the content. If, as a web master, I took the time to transform my website to be compliant with Semantic Standards I would get very little return on my investment because many of the strengths of the Semantic Web involve data integration and aggregation or in other words other semantically enhanced sets of data. Once the sharing of data in a semantically enhanced format becomes common the benefits are great. It will take many years before enough pioneers in the field adopt this technology, reaching a critical mass, but once it does look out, it will explode! If you think about it the internet evolved the same way.

Enough talk about the future. What can you today? Well if you have control over a large information architecture you could semantically enable your data, develop Ontologies that describe and define the data’s meaning and inter-relationships, and take advantage of the benefits of the Semantic Technology. The Semantic Web and Semantic technologies share in common languages, standards, and tools but differ in their goals, application, and maturity.

Many of the benefits Semantic Technology Solutions offer are not new but instead are greatly improved over traditional technologies. I will defer going in depth on the application of these technologies to later articles but some main benefits include content aggregation, concept based navigation and search of data, data integration, information inference, decision assistants, dynamic user interfaces, and much much more.