Future of The Internet – The Semantic Web (Web 3.0)
The internet can be viewed in stages, the early stage was an internet of static pages with text and then images. Technologies improved and we had Web 2.0 mainly the use of dynamic technologies giving birth to social media and the social networking sites we know and use today. The next stage (already underway) called The Semantic Web or Web 3.0 is explained in this section and will have a profound effect on our behaviour, technology and the internet.
Semantic Web
Semantic stands for “the meaning of”. The Semantic of something is “the meaning of something” The Semantic Web “A Web with Meaning”. This is a vision from Tim Berners-Lee the creator of the internet.
In more understandable terms, the Semantic web is making computers more intelligent, so when we describe things computers can associate object “a” with object “b” and get us accurate information.
Current Technology
To get information we rely on (HTML) web code which describes documents and links.
A search for “Plymouth is in the South West of England” will bring up results based on part of the phrase, singular words or bunches of words with the most relevant at the top.
Semantic Technologies
The semantic web code (XML, RDF, OWL) can describe things and the relationships between things.
Semantic web code relies on web users being open with data and information being available in many databases. This information can be used and (XHTML) data from current web pages can be integrated instead of one document in one main source.
This means a search for “Plymouth is in the South West of England” will bring much more meaningful results.
W3C Description
This extract is from the W3C
The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.
Semantic web usage is growing and the technologies are improving and becoming widely used. Hope this helps as a little introduction to the Semantic Web
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