Read a pretty interesting article today: structure paves the way to the semantic web in IEEE artificial intelligence (paper version).
I’ve heard the term semantic web floating about for a while now. Itt means a web where most of the info is machine-parsable or classifiable. The mass of information made readable to software agents, in other words.
This still seemed quite abstract and difficult to picture at the time – for me, anyway. How can you convert such an amorphous mass of pages and multimedia into structured formats ?
This article demonstrates that we’re getting there, and very naturally, too. We have always felt the need to put some order into chaotic masses of information, to make it more accessible: alphabetical classifying, indexing …
Now collaborative processes are working hard at tagging articles, authors themselves tag their posts or articles, RSS and OPML provide shortcuts to reading the whole thing. We have a very fractured but real structure to the flood of information.
Pretty amazing how an abstract concept spawned by academia emerges like this, in a very organic way.