I have been thinking about this for a few weeks, but what with the run up to Christmas and the first Trovus "year end push", I have been putting off writing my thoughts on it.  It's the semantic web debate.  I first heard the phrase used about 18 months ago and gave no time to it, based purely on my lack of understanding.  Then the New Scientist blog ran a post on Social Graphs as a potential model around which a true semantic web could form.  And its no beginner making this connection, its Sir Tim (Berners Lee) himself.  The blog post summaries with his hierarchy of development:

1. The internet - connects computers
2. The web - connects documents
3. The graph - meaningfully connects people and any kind of information

The author reframed from the Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 linkage unlike others, but you can see that if you are looking for a definition of "web 2.0", basing it on these development phases, based on say a 10 year cycle then it could give some form of answer. 

What I have been considering is the language related to the semantic web.  It will be a time when the machinery can infer meaning.  It will be a time when "making sense of an ever-increasing number of emails, web pages, feeds, and social networking contacts" will become a consumer's reality.

That is no doubt a safe prediction.  I don't question for a second that a level of innate intelligence embedded within the "infrastructure" of the web will allow the machinery to support the inferred, rather than the expressed, needs of browsers.  But there is a gap between now and then.  Twine and other commercial sites are looking to drive this market forward, but I see a period of significant education still as the populace need to understand what many of the base applications can achieve.  Take the dependence on email.  We can show the power of taking people away from an email inbox by the deployment of the "appropriate" applications to support all the various ways a human communicates.  But, the behaviours that give these applications value need to be learnt.  It is no coincidence that Trovus has 3 clients currently using our wiki for their own purposes, but mainly to gain experience of what it is actually like to uses such a tool in a commercial environment. 

If you think about all the commercial applications for the semantic web, we can see one clearly in corporate land.  Once people have been weaned off their email dependence and the workforce understands that a wiki and a blog are efficiency tools and work in harmony with email, well then naturally their will be call for tighter filtering of information.  RSS is the first step on this road bring what we deem to be our key resources to distilled viewing portal, but what is let through must be of the relevant and must align to what we truly wanted or needed to understand.  We don't see that level of understanding in the market just yet, but when it comes we hope that Sir Tim and the others will have the semantic web ready...

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