What a twisted Semantic Web we weave...

"I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize."
– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Sounds very futuristic... but what does it all mean?

Semantic Web is all about editors having the ability to publish content in a format that has more meaning and structure to the machines rendering and searching the data. These "machine" readable descriptions will enable human like sorting, linking and prioritising of content by computers.

So for example, content like: $2.99 is a price of this item number 458869 that is a DVD and in the catalogue XYZ. Rather than straight HTML code meaning display this text "$2.99", next to this text "458869" and link to "XYZ". Further, as W3C's example shows, you could be viewing a calendar that shows photos you took on certain days even bank transactions on that date. So it's also about information being linked and viewed across multiple data bases.

So will this so called Web 3.0 really materialise? Some feel that a semantic web will create the need for two sets of published documents, one for humans and one for machines. "They" also say that there are issues of security and accuracy.

I fear though that we can all get ready to cringe as marketing peeps discover this latest web term!

Further reading at W3C