The Future of the Web is Semantic

Imagine if all the information on the web were presented in a way that might be understood by machines as well as people.  Humans can always figure out what to do with the information, but in the Semantic Web, even computers can manipulate information.  With so many online discussions, bookmarks, microblogs and annotations connecting us to others, the Web is slowly becoming a collection of data silos. They are unable make relationships between each other. The Semantic Web can describe people, content objects and the relationships that bind them together, which can provide rich data sources for Semantic Web-aware applications.

With so much globalization and all the social data mashups, it has become critical to think long term, beyond the horizon, or we’ll get lost in what to do with all this information.

One of the recent successful examples of the Semantic Web is the BBC’s World Cup 2010 Web site, which is a large site (over 700 index pages) that takes you to thousands of story pages and content. Managing all these index pages would not be possible if curated by an editor. This is an ideal framework that does not deal with content directly but publishes data about the content (or metadata). The Semantic web changes editorial workflow for creating, distributing and managing the content. All you need to do is to know how to tag specific content with precise metadata linked to uniquely-identified concepts (a concept usually being a person, place or thing) and the index pages are published automatically.

Semantic Web will enable content to be pushed to the users rather than users searching for content on the web. There would be immense personalization on the Web that will allow you to read content based on your profile.  Google’s Chief Executive, Eric Schmidt, was quoted saying: “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’” The Semantic Web will make this possible.

Semantic technologies provide an abstraction layer above existing technologies, which will enable a lot of intelligent, relevant and contextually-aware interactions rather than contemporary portal-based content silos. To organizations, Semantic Web will be able to provide a single unified view of their data across all applications and information portals, eventually reducing data redundancies and bringing more meaningful and contextual data to the frontend.

We are not too far from a time when we can see collaborative editing performed together by both humans and machines. In the future, similar methods will allow finance and business transactions to happen automatically with little or no human involvement.