Tim Berners-Lee Video: The Semantic Web
I recently ran across a wonderful video on YouTube in which Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Wold Wide Web,speaks about the idea of the Semantic Web. It’s a simple, yet elegant concept that has yet to come to fruition asBerners-Lee had originally dreamed.
The Semantic Web is all about expressing the meaning of our content through standardized markup, which is the mantra of any standardista. It’s more than communicating information hierarchy with heading tags. Semantics help us communicate the logic, context, and relationships of our data to computers so they can automate tasks or find important patterns that humans may have missed. On the Semantic Web a simple program could help employers locate the right talent for a project by search keywords in resumes of people near the company. It would also make it possible to automate the coordination of a complex event like a family reunion. If data such as personal schedules, contact information, and venue locations are presented in a standardized way, a program could read the data to identify the best date and location for the event then handle all of the invitations and RSPVs.
Beyond simplifying basic tasks, The Semantic Web could one day save millions of lives. Imagine a search spider that crawls the Web discovering medical ailments that are marked up in a standardized format. Common symptoms in a particular location could be identified and reported to medical experts who could immediately determine if the pattern is actually a dangerous pandemic. It would make it possible to irradiate deadly diseases before they spreads. The same technology could be turned on poverty, violence, genocide, and most any other major issue that plagues humanity.
It’s tragic that Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a Semantic Web is still so far off. The vast majority of content that is published online lacks structure or meaning, which makes it very difficult to find and even more difficult to elicit its meaning. Achieving the goal requires massive buy in from individuals, organizations, governments, and corporations. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s actually quite easy to publish your content semantically, and the idea is gaining some momentum. To learn more about the big ideas of the Semantic Web and what you can do to make your content semantically meaningful to computers check out this brilliant video: Intro to the Semantic Web.