Semantic Web

If computer applications get intelligent enough to search and sort useful data from the Internet, would it save time and effort? How would this impact businesses and market research?

With an increase in the number of websites surfaced search engines. Later social bookmarking sites like www.del.icio.us, de.lirio.us, and www.digg.com, that tag and classify websites, were introduced. These use the collective intelligence of users to help other users. Now the shift is towards Internet applications that can extract and understand content. This way the entire web will open up not just for people but for computer programs as well. This is the beginning of the phase of Semantic Web, popularly called Web 3.0.

Web 1.0 enabled static publication of pages, Web 2.0 allows dynamic interaction between people and Web 3.0 facilitates interaction between computer programs and websites and people. The Semantic Web has the ability to convert the whole Web into a database so that computers can find useful information for us.

Understanding the dynamics of Semantic Web and empowering your business with its tremendous marketing resources can prove to be extremely valuable. Consider the following:

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the standards for Semantic Web in 2004 and many research teams are busy exploring its potential. Project 10X, revealing its full results by 2010, has already projected the market for products and services related to Semantic Web to sky rocket to $50 billion, which is at least 25 times of what it was in 2006.
Semantic Web will be more widely accessible.
Web 3.0 will be implemented at the software level. There will be the creation of more intelligent search engines so that many different sets of data will be described and linked.
There will be intelligent agents or crawlers that will understand and extract the information. These will be able to identify different products, brands, prices and other features on a shopping page. These will produce much better results than some of the vertical searches in use now
For wider reach to products and services the information will be published not just on websites but also through standard feeds at the same time.
There will be advancements in how information is classified and identified. This information will be presented through proprietary presentation and interaction platforms or through open platforms like Yahoo! User Interface (YUI).
Web 3.0 is very user friendly and perfectly programmable. Just by using prefabricated components and without knowledge of writing a code you can create and run your own Web applications, projects and services called ‘pipes’. The output of these can be presented in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), JSON and Atom formats to allow flexibility. These pipes can be accessible to the public.

More knowledgeable applications in Web 3.0 will surface and expand the possibilities. Sky is the limit, so how business owners make use of these innovations is both challenging and immensely interesting. Certainly the Semantic Web has the potential to be one of the most advanced marketing tools used for business.

Date Added: July 14, 2007 05:27:09 PM