Got a great idea for the Semantic Web?
Mention the Semantic Web to most people and their eyes will glaze over. I’m sure that on more than one occassion it has been responsible for triggering out of body experiences 
It’s not that bad people! Actually, the Semantic Web is pretty cool and has the potential to change the way we use the internet.
Simply put, the Semantic Web is all about machine discoverable data. Its kind of like META data but more flexible and a whole lot more powerful.
Take the simple example of your typical ‘contact us’ page on just about any website on the internet. Normally you could expect to find email and postal addresses and phone and fax numbers. That’s great for you and me (i.e. humans) but what’s a machine to do? How does it now that number X is a phone number and number Y is a fax? Well, the Semantic web makes this possible by allowing this data to be marked up in such a way that machines will now be able to recognise it. But why would you want to do this? To make your life easier of course!!
Imagine you had a SW (Semantic Web) extension installed in your browser which could detect marked up data and automatically add a contact to your contact list of your favourite email, messenger and voip applications. How cool would that be!? Thats the potential power of the Semantic Web!
The W3C recently formed the Semantic Web Education & Outreach Working Group who’s goal is pretty self evident. They recently put together a wiki so that developers or anyone with a good idea can suggest a project that can be used as a demonstration of the Semantic Web.
If you have a good idea then i encourage you to contribute to the wiki. The deadline for submissions is the 13th of February so get your thinking cap on.
3 Responses to “Got a great idea for the Semantic Web?”
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[...] Why Microformats are good At a glance, they’re brilliant and the hCard is good because it means no more copying and pasting text from Web pages. Furthermore, Microformats is a decent example of how the Semantic Web can benefit everyone, albeit a very tiny example and a tiny implementation of the Semantic Web. [...]
You could not have explained it better, David! I’d be interested to discuss the wider use of the semantic web. A few months back now, I read an article published by the BBC that described the Semantic Web as a web that could be “understood” by machines (as opposed to “read”). The article went on to say that at present searching for information is usually down to the person, and that it can be quite long winding process to find what you’re looking for.
With the semantic web data can be tagged and categorised so that the user can ask more complex questions such as (extracted from the BBC article): “find a hotel that costs less than £50 a night, that has a large swimming pool, and is less than five minutes walk from the beach.”. Can you imagine the commercial implications of this?
[...] Why Microformats are good At a glance, they’re brilliant and the hCard is good because it means no more copying and pasting text from Web pages. Furthermore, Microformats is a decent example of how the Semantic Web can benefit everyone, albeit a very tiny example and a tiny implementation of the Semantic Web. [...]