Idevs

At the moment the web is a lot like a giant book, we can search the book e.g. Which pages contain information about the weather in London? This will bring up a list of websites and pages that contain the term weather and London. However we cannot yet ask a question like ‘What is the current weather in London’ this would only direct us to pages where we would have to find the information ourselves.

So what is the solution to this problem? The only way this can be done is to markup the data we have into a machine readable form, at the moment the current standard is XML.

With XML the content provider can markup their data in a language that machines can understand, interpret and process. Say, for example, that the code snippet below represented the weather data:

<weather>
     <city name="london">Sunny</city>
     <city name="new york">Cloudy</city>
</weather>

In reality of course the data would be more complex, but the theory remains the same, all it takes is a simple search engine spider with an XML parser to come along and read that data and process it. Or an application could download the file to your calendar and a little popup could sound telling you to take an umbrella if it was going to rain or recommend a sun cream to use.

Once data is liberated, it can be used by any applications that support it. If for example I published information about a party on my blog, your feed reader could search through and find a microformat, it could then pass this information to your calendar application and that could then inform you of the event, and maybe suggest some clothing to wear based on the weather. That is the Data Web, what I like to think of as one of the underlying basis of the Semantic Web.

In the Semantic Web the computers would be able to search and query the web for us, and then be able to combine and mesh the data together e.g. I tell a semantic searcher to provide me with information on New York, it should then deliver information regarding history, weather data local events, politics, news etc. It should then correlate all this in a way that helps me. This will be accomplished through a variety of technologies namely RDF. But that is for another day.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.