Finally, a Practical Use for the Semantic Web
A little over a year ago, I found an article on the Semantic Web and decided to do some research on it. At the time it didn’t seem like there was a practical use for the technology that drives it, but it looks like that may soon change.
I recently came across this article over at TechCrunch, which describes how Yahoo! is planning to open their search results to developers who can use the technology behind the Semantic Web, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and microformats, to personalize them. As author Michael Arrington points out, maybe now that Yahoo! is giving RDF and microformats a practical use, the ideas and technology behind the Semantic Web can actually become practical for us developers to implement. This is the type of integration that I was looking for over a year ago.
The ideology driving the Semantic Web - giving meaning to data on Web sites for use in applications - has exciting implications. As it stands now the information on the Web creates a type of collective white noise, making it nearly impossible to distinguish potentially useful information from meaningless data. I would assume that the same boom that occurred with the Social Web, such as flickr and del.icio.us, will also happen when we organize information with Semantic Web technologies. However, the purpose of these startups will most likely be aggregating data versus connecting people.
This technology has me just as stoked as the Web Standards movement had me a few years back. When I decided to make the transition from table layouts to Web Standards, I sat down and consumed as much CSS, XHTML, and browser-specific tweaks necessary for sites to function in cross-browser environments. I foresee my embrace of the Semantic Web to be a similar venture; possibly more so due to my weighted left brain’s desire for structure.
My only hope is that the Semantic Web doesn’t become widely known as Web 3.0.
