It can be quite difficult to find the information that we are looking for on the World Wide Web. Usually it involves at least a few search engine searches to find the most relevant webpage, based on the keywords that are used within the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) text of a webpage. Even then, it requires a user to scan/read through the webpage to find out the information that they are looking for. If only there was a simpler way?

There may be a way and it is already in use, its called the “Semantic Web”. The idea of the semantic is that the web would become a huge database. Data contained within a website (even application or database) would be structured and have a relationship to other parts of data. Providing the data in this form would make it more accessible and much more reusable. Such a system would enable machine code and search engines to find exactly the data required and eliminate the need for human input to find the desired data.

The Semantic Web would not be new web, it would be an extension on the current web. It would add new metadata and data to the existing web; this new meta data is called RDF (resource description framework). This metadata will combine into HTML just like XML does. The semantic web in a combination of smaller semantic web’s, each of these smaller webs will each have its own area and be connected to the one large semantic web.

Such a system originated from Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, the inventor of WWW (World Wide Web) and the director of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). In my opinion, it’s exactly what the web needs, the ability to find the exact piece of information you desire at the click of a button. If sure we’ll be hearing a lot more about semantic web in the near future, with Yahoo announcing they will be adopting some of the key semantic standards. This means that semantic web identifiers will be looked at when indexing Yahoo websites. All I’m going to say is watch this space….