23 Musings

So says Tim Berners-Lee in this article on the future of the web, search and semantic technologies over on the Times website.

I tend to agree with him unless Google move into the semantic search space pretty quickly. With Yahoo announcing support for semantic mark-up within their search index Google will surely not want to be left behind.

I'd like to think the future of Google will embrace semantic technologies and make it a real 'discovery engine', surfacing links of high relevance to searchers through much stronger understanding of the content within.

As an aside; one thing I've been thinking would be a nice app would be a semantic web robot which you could set off to scour the web for content and with the added semantic features (rather than the more usual boolean profile based robot) it could learn as it went by allowing you to score results for relevance to you. The first really intelligent agent?

Alex Iskold has written a great article over at Read/Write Web posing some ideas about what could be the first semantic killer web app.

For me the killer app will be one of two things. Either a true natural language, intelligent search engine that understands what users mean by their generally vague search queries and intelligently learns from your searches to keep improving on your search results. The other possibility (in my opinion) is an organiser tool based on social graph portability and semantic understanding of the data you store there, thus enabling easy organisation of your data/contacts/information and intelligent linking/suggestion of uses for it. The second option is a little vague but it's something I personally would find useful as I have hoardes of personal data stored in various web services with no real links between them, joining this data up could be a very powerful thing.

Semantic search would be an amazing addition to a travel website. A lot of online travel sites are currently getting into intelligent search as a new way to browse content and mine prices and information, the addition of semantic understanding to these intelligent algorithms could make finding a holiday online a much more rewarding experience for the user by providing real suggestions and inspirational content accurately based on a users searches. Technology like this could also herald the end of the traditional booking engine as a starting point for travel sites and get back to a more user friendly model of assisted browsing and content mining.