The Semantic Web as a working concept may still be light years away, but some forward thinking Internet companies are already looking at ways to integrate some important standards in to its practices.

Just yesterday I wrote an article about Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and how he believes The Semantic Web will mean some big players on the Web at the moment will find themselves superseded by companies who take advantage of The Semantic Web.

It seems as I was writing this, Yahoo! was making it’s intentions clear, and announcing on its blog the integration of exactly the type of tool that has Berners Lee so excited about the future of the Internet.

As part of its new Yahoo! Search open platform, Yahoo! is going to integrate a number of standards which are going to turn The Semantic Web from a nice idea in the heads of visionaries, to an actual working model which can be used by everyday people such as you and me.

At the moment, search engines, such as Yahoo! and Google, use a combination of text and connections between sites as the standard for providing relevance.

If a search engine were to start using Semantic Web standards instead, this would mean the actual meaning of data on any given page would be used instead, in theory giving people a much higher hit rate of relevant material.

Initially these plans are limited to a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Over the next few months, Yahoo! promises to reveal more details about what this support could mean in the future.

Yahoo! Search Blog writer Amit Kumar, who is also the Director of Product Management at Yahoo! Search, used LinkedIn as an example:

“By marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site.”

“With a richer understanding of LinkedIn’s structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site.”

It’s a great thing that Yahoo! are getting involved in trying to make The Semantic Web a reality at such an early stage of development, but we need to realise how far we are away from seeing that happen.

Professor Wendy Hall from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and a director of the Web Research Science Initiative, told BBC News:

“With the semantic web we’re at the place the Web was in 1992.”

I don’t even remember the Web in 1992, so that should tell you how much work there is to do. While The Semantic Web won’t make a difference to our lives right now, as we’re only just getting to see the fruits from Web 2.0, there will come a time when we’ll all be linked every time we venture online. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on your point of view.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 5:30 pm under Internet, Opinion, Web2.0, Yahoo!.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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