The Semantic Web is Coming

Wow! It’s amazing at how fast the World Wide Web and the ability for information to be exchanged and communicated between individuals, groups and the masses have evolved. It was only a little more than 15 years ago that the World Wide Web finally began to pick up steam and grab viewers and contributors. However, in such a short period of time billions of people have utilized the web and today it is considered by many their most important information and entertainment resource. So with the WWW finally a major resource in our life and with web 2.0 peaking, many are looking to the next big thing for the web and most in the industry simply call it Web 3.0. So what will Web 3.0 be defined as? While many of the aspects of Web 3.0 such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence are already available in a limited form, one of core technologies that Web 3.0 will involve is the semantic web.
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The Semantic Web

While you can find a whole host of technological definitions on what exactly is the semantic web, for most web surfers trying to grasp this concept, the semantic web can be explained in the following ways:

Currently, the vast majority of people search the web via text. For instance if you are looking to find information on a HD TV, you would simply head over to Google or your favorite search engine and enter text such as: “HDTV” or for more detail and better results, you might want to include: “Sony HDTV 52 inches”. The search engine would then use its algorithms and incredibly large capacity of databases of submitted links to return perhaps the most closely related searches to your text input. It should be noted with all this technology and powerful computers and database the search for HDTV is pretty rudimentary and it is due to semantics or the lack there of.

Unfortunately, all the computers and databases that help you conduct a search for HDTV don’t know what an HDTV is and are only looking for tags and other basic info to help you conduct your search. While your search results are usually decent, imagine how much better they could be if the computers, databases and servers involved in your search actually had the intelligence to understand what an HDTV is- your searches would be far more superior and the potential of the Web’s reach exponentially greater. This is what the semantic web is about- finally giving computers, servers, machines, etc enough artificial intelligence so that they understand what you are actually searching for and not just fetching data in simple tag form that fits in its extremely small parameters.

Media Finally Becomes Recognizable

When we search for images, music, video, etc we are using text to conduct search. This is why it is very difficult to search for an image using an image. For instance, if you have an image of a blue ball with distinct markings, you don’t usually copy and paste this image into your search engine to find others like it, you would first have to describe the image in text form and then search for it via conventional ways. With the semantic web, this can all change. Whether it is music, video, images, etc the web will understand what you are searching for and what others offer and whether they are a close enough match.

What makes the semantic web so difficult up until know is not only the artificial intelligence aspect of the web- having enough brain power to understand what an object is in order to conduct a thorough search, but also to understand the relationship between objects, ideas, etc. With the semantic web, there is a very strong need for data mining and computer languages that can easily communicate with one another on a higher level that is much more capable than today.

The Ability to Share Information and Media in New Ways

There is plenty of theorizing available as what the semantic web will be like once it finally arrives. And while many aspects of the semantic web and of web 3.0 are just theory, many expect big changes to help us share information not only easier, but more intuitively. Today, our media and data are stored on computers that are considerably much more convenient and wireless than just a decade ago, but there is so much more we can do to make the experience of accessing and sharing our media and data with others much more fulfilling and instant. Wifi and wireless communications will definitely help to make this idea a reality, whether in its current 3G, 4G, Bluetooth form or other technologies such as so called Wimax. Not only transferring data more quickly will be helpful, but the ease in which we locate our data that we have stored more intuitively and the ability to share it with others easier without technological barriers will be a byproduct of the semantic web.

The Semantic Web and Search Engine Optimization

For SEO’s looking to gain a better understanding of the semantic web in order to give their clients a jump on the upcoming technology, the best advice is to be patient. The semantic web is still in its infancy- probably at its conception, so in which direction the semantic web takes us is hard to guess.

However, if there is a strategy that one can utilize to take advantage of the up and coming semantic web it would be the strategy that is the simplest of them all- continue to create web pages that are relevant to the information and products that you sell. While there will no doubt be new and innovative computer languages and data mining techniques evolving, the fact of the matter is that you always want visitors coming to your site that are interested in the information and products that you offer. There is no use trying to offer information about apples, when a web surfer is looking for oranges and vice versa, so with the upcoming innovations in the web the most prudent strategy for right now is a wait and see attitude.

Obviously, as this technology matures, there should be plenty of ways to optimize content and make it easier for computers to read and understand what your websites offer- but right now it is still too early to predict the variety of directions that this amazing new technology will take us.

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BY Roger Janik
Source：PromotionWorld