The Semantic Web is Your Friend

The Semantic Web is an initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to enable, "... an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation". At the technological level it "... provides a common framework that allows DATA to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries". True as that may be, the Semantic Web is probably best understood in terms of its applications; by what it lets you do rather than by its underlying technology. This approach was used to good effect in a 2001 article in Scientific American, by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web) and colleagues, to provide a highly readable introduction to the Semantic Web. Now, three years on, the Semantic Web is rapidly making the transition from research to mainstream application and it seems appropriate to take a look at what this means for information researchers.