Many of our potential customers come to use because they have become overwhelmed by the velocity at which information and digital technology are expanding and increasing. The amount of pages indexed by Google is now more than 1 trillion, and the content generated on social networks adds many billion more endpoints to the Web each day.
That’s why the “semantic Web” could hold such potential to better organize and structure searches of the Web. In a recently released mini-documentary Web 3.0, NYU journalism and psychology student Kate Ray interviews leading experts to find out where progress has been made on developing new technologies that capture not only the relationships between Web pages and pieces of content, but the meaning of the relationship as well.
As one would expect in a fledgling industry where there is a high level of technical sophistication and a vast opportunity to exploit, many of the participants in the Web 3.0 documentary have varying views about the potential and possible shape of the semantic Web. Some researchers think the semantic Web could unlock unseen potential in information delivery and retrieval, making current search engine technology seem as efficient as library card catalogs seem today. Others think the term has simply devolved into marketing speak, and the idea will remain a compelling fantasy and nothing more.
I tend to fall into the former category, and think that semantic innovation will revolutionize online information delivery for the benefits of academics and students, as well as businesses and customers. The value of adding relevant context to online connections—and making that context a factor in how information is sorted and retrieved—could make the effectiveness and usefulness of search increase by an order of magnitude.
Adding semantics to Web results and navigation likely will involve referencing some amount of social data from social networks, content aggregators, and review engines, among other sources. When this layer of information begins to affect search results—which it already has to some degree with Google personalized results—the importance of businesses producing social content will increase dramatically.
None of the experts interviewed in the Web 3.0 documentary discussed any sort of time horizon before the semantic Web has an impact on search. But if the rate at which the impact of social networks expanded is any indication of the potential for semantic Web to become an important part of digital marketing, businesses should begin considering the effects of the semantic Web on their online presence.
