Many of the services that are being developed as part of the ‘semantic web’ are necessarily works in progress, but they all contribute to extending the success of this burgeoning area of technology. There are plenty more popping up all the time, but for the purposes of this post I have loosely grouped some prominent sites into specialities – social networking, search and browsing – before briefly explaining their uses.
There are billions of pages of unsorted and unclassified information online, which make up millions of terabytes of data with almost no organisation. It is not necessarily true that some of this information is valuable whilst some is worthless, that’s just a judgement for who desires it. At the moment, the most common way to access any information is through the hegemonic search engines which act as an entry point.
Yet, despite Google’s dominace of the market and culture, the methodology of search still isn’t satisfactory. Leading technologists see the next stage of development coming, where computers will become capable of effectively analysing and understanding data rather than just presenting it to us. Search engine optimisation will eventually be replaced by the ‘semantic web’.