Web 3.0 and Semantic Web

Imagine searching for something on web and finding it in the first page of search results, how often does this happen ?  if you happen to be looking for some product then one sees results after results selling the product.  Anyway Semantic Web or Web 3.0 could change all this,  as web sites start marking their content one is more likely to find search results to be relevant.  As the content ( include bad and misleading content) grows exponentially finding relevant content will grow more and more difficult.  Read what Semantic web is all about and how it will change our web experience.

Searching is just one of the areas where we will see the influence  of Web 3.0, changes will also affect on how we are able to mashup information from different sites to get relevant answers.  For example a query ‘list all US Presidents that studied in ivy league ?’ .  looking at the query we instinctively know what we are looking for, search engines will parse it for keywords and list out all web pages that have the words US president, ivy league.  and since the term ivy league applies to certain universities the results would be all over the place.  The above scenario is a bit simplistic because most search engines understand that ‘US Presidents’ as a single keyword and not two, anyway I hope you get my drift on what we can expect from Web 3.0.

Semantic web article is also posted at informationzen.org.

Microformats – first step towards semantic web

Semantic web will have a tough time relying solely on natural language processing to extract semantic knowledge from content.  Microformats are not only useful for annotating data on web pages but their format specifications are a good starting point for designing content entry forms for commonly used entities.  Some of commonly used microformats are

• hCard for user profile
• hCalendar for calendar or events
• hReview – for product/recipe reviews
• geo – geographical location
• hatom – rss entry/blogs/web pages
• XFN – human relationships

Using microformats is not just useful for semantic web, which is not expected until year 2010, but embedding microformats is more likely to increase your rankings in search listings.  With the amount of data on web growing exponentially, keyword based search is becoming less of a solution.  Yahoo has already announced that it will be processing web content for semantic data and its support for microformats.