January 12, 2010 Introduction in Semantic Web
Semantic Web is an evolutionary development of the World Wide Web, in which the meaning of information on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and search engines. Semantics is the science which studies the meaning of words and how they are used in a language, but when it comes to Semantic Web, the term "semantic" is used to describe two different concepts.
The first concept is related with the way metadata is added to web structure. By contributing to the organization of all Internet data, this concept helps search engines to find and combine data in a more human-understandable way.
The second concept regards users. They will be able to use a language similar to human language when communicating with search engines or other machines on the web. Even if the first concept is an effort worthy of praise it does not necessarily mean we will be able to talk (in the broad sense of the word) with Search engines and machines as we would with other humans. Moreover, we must remember that people want to adapt better to the way computers talk not vice-versa.
A common sense question related to this technology is: "Who uses it?" Web Semantics is a technology that is evolving very rapidly. Unfortunately, it is not easy to understand by an average developer because it was especially created for academicians and artificial intelligence. Technologies such as Semantics are more useful in these areas because help researchers build and manage huge amounts of information.
While Web 2.0 is focused on people and communication, the Semantic Web is focused on machines. It is not a separate entity of the World Wide Web, but rather an extension that adds data and metadata to web documents. This extension allows web documents to be processed by both machines and people.
More and more, the notion of context is used by the search engine. This is more visible in their tools and accessories. Becoming a quite common term, context provides inspiration and a wide range of ideas for the future of the web - including also new means of personalization. Search engine will process searches in the surrounding context, which will allow more accurate search results which can better reflect the user actual intentions. Guiding the user searches depending on the context around the search query eliminates all possible ambiguities.
