By Brooke Aker
Alt Search Engines

The world wide web is going semantic. But what does that mean? A semantic web is an advanced version of the current web. It is a place where information about the information is more than a URL, a title, an author, a date and some keywords that get picked up by the large search engines. A semantic web is a web that has metadata about every paragraph, sentence and word embedded behind the page.

With the extra metadata, search engines will be able to find, understand and deliver web pages about cancer in the context of zodiac signs and skip the web pages with cancer in the context of out-of-control cell growth. Won’t that be a relief? No more sorting the pages you want from ones that don’t matter.

There are many who see how powerful and productive this semantic web is becoming. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, and now the primary proponent of the semantic web, saw the value in a semantic web over 10 years ago when he and the W3C began to architect it. But now we are at a turning point.

… There are some important additional clues from both Google and Microsoft about the shape of the semantic web beyond the announcement war.

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