The Semantic Web is Here. Ish.
April 10th, 2008 | by Brad King |Web 2.0 (I hate that name) is all the rage these days. Everyone is rushing out to build their blogs, their vlogs, the Tweetlogs, lifestreams and Tumblogs, but there’s been on very important component that’s missing: organization.
Parsing information from the never-ending fire hit-and-miss at best. I have RSS feeds that continually grab contents — and right now I have more than 2,000 unread items.
Hardly a winning proposition for a website.
However, there are some new systems that integrate machine learning to parse out meaning from an HTLM page. It’s a machine-created tag cloud, for instance, that allows patterns to develop in seemingly disparate pages.
In other words, the Web is semantic.
On a very basic level, WordPress has a plug-in that pulls common tags and keywords from my story (once I’ve typed 150 words) that enables me to have my information included with a developing network of tags.
That means I don’t have to guess my keywords. I can add keywords on if I choose, but I’m assured that my content is at least tagged in a way that matches up with what others are doing.
Does that ensure that my content will be labeled correctly? Hell no. We’re in Day One of the universe. There’s a long way to go until we have this working properly.
But it’s a start.
Reuters has jumped in the game as well, opening up its Calais search engine to companies. The engine does exactly what my plug-in does: builds a machine-created semantic tagging system.
