I tend to reject buzzwords, and semantic web is a term that’s as buzz-y as they come. The best ideas end up buzz-ified, though… I’ll do my dissertation on the Phases of the Web here soon, providing a different view on Web 2.0, etc. But today I am thinking about data, content… how to unlock it, associate it and describe it… so we can build more insightful ways for users to get their information. 

As a part off my quest I went back and re-read Tim Berners-Lee’s seminal paper on the Semantic Web. The clarity of insight into the problem is awe inspiring:

“The Semantic Web is not designed just as a new data model – it is specifically appropriate to the linking of data of many different models. One of the great things it will allow is to add information relating to different databases on the Web, to allow sophisticated operations to be performed across them.”

Yes. That’s what I want to do. The term Semantic Web just took on renewed meaning for me. Not buzz, but a path, a de-hyped recipe for getting good stuff done. In fact, there’s a sort of pragmatism that’s very appealing:   

“We remove the centralized concepts of absolute truth, total knowledge and total provability, and see what we can do with limited knowledge.”

I can work with that. The world is messy. Data, content and metadata are messy.

Yes. Now get on with it: create systems that can adapt to the chaos, take advantage of the specific design of each data source.

When you’re handling content from the Web this is a no-brainer. It’s very obvious. When thinking about a company with purpose-built databases/models, each with domain-specific content - with significant expense in creating, maintaining and cleansing highly structured data it’s a very different proposition. That’s the challenge of vertical search. Health, autos, financial services, shopping… we’ve all got the problem.

Who’s doing it well? I’m going to be digging in to get underneath this and I’d love to hear people’s thoughts if you happen by this post.