An Introduction to the Semantic Web

I believe in the last few months, all of us have heard a lot about the Web 2.0 revolution. There is some awesome work going on in these technologies. With websites like Digg, Delicious becoming billion dollar success stories, this is certain that Web 2.0 is going to be a Hit.

One of the very primitive Web 2.0 ideas was the internet directory Dmoz, where the surfers could index any website of their choice onto a particular category, thus creating a large user based directory. It was a marathon of an effort and is now quite successful. The ideas like Digg and Delicious take this idea a step further.

Ajax has also played a pivotal role in all this success. The people who invested in technologies like Ajax a year ago are now reaping the fruits of their investment.

This is so far the success story so what’s next. What after Web 2.0? Well the idea is called Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web. Great institutions like the W3C have already started the research about the web 3.0.

So what is the Semantic Web?
The idea is that we should be able to do segregate the internet on the basis of meanings rather than the words, as the current web is. Like for example a search engine like Google returns around half a billion results when I query it for the keyword “Apple”. And all these results are related to Steve Job’s Apple. What if I am talking about the Fruit Apple? Shouldn’t and Search Engine who is giving me half a billion results first ask me in what context I am querying something. This is an argument worth entering into.

I am suggesting that we should stop using google; all I am saying is that in the Next Generation Search engine the context or rather the meaning of a work will play a much more crucial role then just the word itself.

And apart from it think about the videos, images and audio files that are there on the internet. With the onset of Web 3.0 we would be able to not only search these multimedia sources but also search the objects present in these.

These ideas are still in white papers and will take some time to actually get implemented on the internet, and thus the time is right for an inquisitive soul of research about the semantic web.