Waiting for the Semantic Web

What’s the Latest Development?

Major search companies Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have begun a project to make the adoption of the Semantic Web easier by standardizing the information required to be apart of the next incarnation of the Internet. “These specifications would let website publishers better use markup tags to more accurately describe the words, numbers, and other material on their pages, enabling search engines and other applications to more clearly determine their meaning in context.”

What’s the Big Idea?

While the Semantic Web has for years been billed as the next generation Internet, it has failed to truly catch on. But thanks to Schema.org—the new standardization initiative—sophisticated Internet users will be able to search for linked data describing the same people, places and things. Yahoo researcher and data architect Peter Mika thinks this makes searching for various content sources that address the same concepts much easier: “These are powerful technologies that let sophisticated users find, share, and process data, as well as find related datasets.”