If you’ve liked my last post, you should take a look at Kevin Kelly’s video at TED, about the first and the next 5,000 days of the Web, which a friend pointed out to me. “Smarter” is Kevin’s first tag to describe the next web, and given the timescale he chooses, it is a safe bet. In the short term, ubiquitous (Kevin’s second or third tag) is probably more likely to describe the Web.

Below, I am pursuing my exploration of the interaction between Web 3.0, the Semantic Web and Linked Data. I shared my thoughts on Web 3.0 in the previous post, so now let’s tackle the Semantic Web, and what it will take for it to really happen.

Semantic Web

What is the semantic web? Here again I’ll refer to a post I wrote not too long ago, in which I wrote this is “a web in which machines get the meaning of information and use that understanding to transform/organize/synthesize data intelligently on our behalf.” Definition varies, but overall I think we all agree that the Semantic Web is an attempt at enabling machines to better understand and transform data. This is the overarching Objective, with a big O, of the semantic web.

In a world with a working Semantic Web, I should not only be able to know without launching a full web expedition, which Chinese restaurant in a 5-mile/km radius carries Peking Duck, but also to aggregate and filter information from various subprime real estate lenders by region and map that against mortgage default rates and lenders’ pools of debt by risk level in a snap. That type of easy data transformation could help avoid a financial crisis of gigantic proportions, which, some would argue, is a handy benefit worth its weight in trillions of dollars. (more…)