One of my areas of interest is The Semantic Web. I’d like to take just a moment to describe what it is and why it’s important. The link above is a really great introduction to the Semantic Web and I would suggest anyone that’s interested in the evolution of human thought and knowledge take a good read.
The basic idea is as follows. The current World Wide Web is built for humans to understand. Computers are simply playing the role of formatters. They pull data off of a server and follow embedded instructions to format the data for humans to read. While this capability is incredibly powerful at providing connections and information to people, it is not take full advantage of the power of computing hardware.
The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web. The basic idea is that additional data can be encoded into directly into a web page which is understandable by computers. This data is expressed in extremely simple terms (called tuples). Tuples very closely mimic natural language. Typically, they describe information in a simple subject, verb, object sort of structure.
For example:
Shad (subject) lives in (verb) Texas (object).
And while this may seem rather simplistic, it’s actually quite powerful (these are the basic building blocks of human language). Having many of these short simple sentences captured in a format that computers can easily parse allows for deductions to be made from the data.
So, how does this affect you? How does this help? What does this mean?
Well, not much… yet. But, being able to capture knowledge in a format that computers can parse means that, over time, we’ll be able to make more effective use of the collected knowledge of mankind. To be more clear, we’re creating the capability to parse all of our collective combined knowledge. In the short term, this simply means that computers will be able to help us to make decisions more quickly and effectively (as more data will be immediately available to each of us).
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The semantic web is quite likely to be the next great leap in information organization. The world wide web has been transformative for those fortunate enough to have access to it, and the semantic web is likely to have even more impact on our daily lives.
The most interesting project dealing with the semantic web that I’m aware of is Haystack, a personal information organization platform under development at MIT:
http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/index.html
This piece of software is truly amazing. The interaction metaphors are, by and large, really terrible right now, but the power exposed is pretty incredible. You can do things like automatically define tautologies and tuples for the metadata in your music collection (the artist for this song is person X, and the album title is Y), and then tie that data together with the other data you’ve collected, like email. This allows you to do things like ask Haystack to “find me all of the songs and album titles on my computer that were performed by one of my friends.”
Very, very cool.
The semantic web is also likely to greatly enhance general web search capabilities.
- a
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