The web, as it is right now, can only understand the meaning of specific words individually. It doesn’t have the ability to relate terms to each other and understand the meaning of a whole sentence, and thus it can’t answer questions by itself.
Let’s say we were to perform a search on Google, and ask “What day is it tomorrow?”. The query is simple, but the current machine can’t do more than give us links to pages were all those words are featured. It doesn’t distinguish between the “day” that is the 24-hour period of time, “day” as the opposite of night, or “day” as part of the title of a book, a movie or the name of a person. It’s also unable to take into account the circumstances surrounding the search, such as the date, which would specify just which “tomorrow” we refer to.
The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the web, which would solve this problem. Instead of simply showing us all the information available and have us go over everything before we finally find what we were looking for, the new system would be able to understand just what it is that we need and make a sellection intelligently. In other words, it would be aware of the context.
References:
- Guía Breve de Web Semántica. (2008, February 7). In World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved October 30, 2008.
- Semantic Web. (2008, November 4). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved November 4, 2008.
- Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality. (2008, May 30). In Alex Iskold Technology Blog. Retrieved October 30, 2008.
