Semantic Web and The Future of Search Engines

[Plato]

Humans are capable browsing the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Malaysian word for "Food" or to compare prices and search for the best coupon rates available. This is because of our symbolic reasoning capability. A computer on the other hand is quite limited in its ability to reason out the underlying meaning of the information on web pages. Much work is currently being done in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. The guys at Carnegie Mellon University are at the forefront of this research.

The semantic web is a vision by the W3C (Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Team) of information that is understandable by computers. This will enable computers take on the more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.

Today, this task requires search engines that are specialized to every website being searched. The semantic web provides a common standard using the Resource Definition Language (RDF). With this, websites can publish content in a more machine-processable and easily integrated form. This information seeking would be done by Intelligent Agents.

If you want to learn more about this interesting and emerging field of Semantic Web and RDF you can visit the W3C link below.

Semantic Web