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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

WATBlog Update "Commercial Viability of Semantic Web May be Sooner Than You Think" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"Commercial Viability of Semantic Web May be Sooner Than You Think" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Commercial Viability of Semantic Web May be Sooner Than You Think

Semantic Web Logo

If John Davies, the Head of Next Generation Web Research at BT, is to be believed, Semantic Web may be commercially viable sooner than you think. Does this mean that the days of Web 2.0 and the community gone by?

Wikipedia defines ‘Semantic Web‘ as

an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.

The term was derived from W3C director, Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information and knowledge exchange. Semantic Web is seen as the development of the World Wide Web where the content of information and services are defined to make web content more searchable and useful.

Speaking to silicon.com, John Davies says:

We’ve really seen the emergence of semantic web from the research lab. We’re just on the cusp of R&D to a range of real world applications.

Lately, there have been numerous advancements in this field of Semantic Web. Various startups have tried their luck with the technology and have had diverse results. Microsoft, who has been playing ‘catch-up’ to Google and Yahoo in the search market, recently bought Powerset, the Semantic Language Search Engine, in its attempt to gain some ground.

Similarly, Yahoo’s SearchMonkey service adds semantic information to web content so as to make it visually appealing to the visitor and makes it more useful, which in turn drives traffic. Nuconomy, an Israeli start up, provides in-depth analytical data about a website using semantics. Thomson Reuters also made the semantic technology available to others through its OpenCalais service. There are numerous such start ups and companies that have already incorporated Semantic technology into their products.

According to Davies, in today’s era, there is a greater importance given to how semantic web technology can help businesses and how it can be commercially helpful. He adds:

Semantic web has been around for a while now. A lot of work has been done on the building blocks.

The researcher goes on to mention that BT is also developing a semantic technology that will be able to interrogate a range of databases with just a single search query. He believes that there will be a significant increase in the real-world application of semantic technology over the course of next year.

Semantic Technology holds key features that are bound to change the shape the future of web for us. It is now left to us, to make use of these technologies, and make the web even simpler to use, so that the vast amount of knowledge, that the web holds, reaches each and every user with the click of a button.

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