5) What is the 'semantic web'?
According to Berners-Lee within Scientific American, ‘The Semantic Web’, semantic web will be the next generation of the Web. However, the key difference is that the semantic web will not merely regurgitate pre-programmed information back to you; it will understand the deeper meaning of the data and be able to use it in a similar way which a human would interpret it. No longer will computers think in terms of lists of 0 and 1, instead it will have a much deeper understanding and be able to help us in ways which were previously impossible.
This therefore opens up lots of new possibilities from the web. Things will be able to be synchronized with each other with a lot more logic than previously possible. However, to me this seems like an extremely large task. How can a computer possibly have the same logic and thinking as a human can? To me it seems like there will inevitably be a number of “holes” with this system, as there are just too many possibilities and variables which go through the human mind which a computer cannot replicate. Maybe this is because such technology seems inconceivable to me given the basic problems of technology at the moment (basic things like being unable to filter search results more specifically or by the required number of fields, I am always being told “your search has generated no results, please edit your search and try again”) Although I am reassured that this technology is on its way, to me it seems a long way off before this ideal is put into useful practice in everyday life.
Berners-Lee,T., J. Hendler and O. Lassila (2001) ‘The Semantic Web’, Scientific American Volume 284 (Issue 5): P.28–37.
One of the key aspects of this 'semantic' notion is 'marking up' information by tagging it in some sort of matrix of related categories, as Flickr and Delicious do for images and urls. Social tagging is seen by some as the best route to content aware search, retrieval and presentation.
ReplyDeleteIt is these people who tend to see Web 3.0 as 'just over the horizon'. Pessimists point to the vast amount of classification required and the computing power needed to make much (automatic) sense of the huge number of conflicting propositions possible in such a set up.
Amazon uses a simple 'context aware social tagging' system to propose "other things you might like" -we all know how annoying that is don't we?