As dependency on the internet increases, so does the number of technological developments in order to enhance the web experience of every user. One such example of more recent technology is semantic web that provides a common framework for data searched to be processed through machines. Many sectors in the industry have already proven the validity of semantic web and developers continue to explore the technology in order to be widely used by different sectors including social networking, publishing and blogging. While the semantic web solution has not yet gained recognition from the community of users, this development is expected to be an evolution of the present Worldwide Web.
Based on the vision of Tim Berners-Lee, he originally expressed the following idea:
“I have a dream for the Web (in which computers) became capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web” which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”[1]
Should the dream of Berners-Lee come to reality with the development of Semantic Web, individuals and businesses can go about their normal lives without the efforts and time exerted at search engines. Search results will be more significant since machines will accomplish the tasks as data that is limited to human will be machine readable. The machines can act upon the enormous data from different applications, technologies and concepts and the results provided will definitely be what the end-user requires.
An innovative technology that changes the way you do business
Do you realize the outcome if you could teach your computer to automate the process of intelligent decision making which you can easily implement for various aspects of your business like customer support and warehousing? The development of semantic technology is probably overwhelming but it can improve knowledge management within your company and will minimize manual intervention. This technology provides you with a definite edge over the competitor since you obtain a revolutionary framework that can be a strategic decision maker. Semantic is the future and developers need understand how semantic works technically and how businesses will able to use it to gain the competitive advantage.
The challenges faced by semantic web
The Worldwide Web contains billions of content and semantic web has to deal with semantic duplicated terms that have not been eliminated. Critics also continue to question the feasibility of the semantic web technology from the perspective of human manipulation to mislead semantic search engines. There will always be attempts to include spurious metadata into the Web pages which will ultimately affect veracity. There are also fears about government censorship since with the implementation of semantic web they can easily control the viewing and creation of online information. Even with the eagerness towards development of the semantic technology, there is concern over the efforts at creating two formats for data – one for humans to understand and another for machines.