Semantic Web (Web 3.0?)

Remember my post Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us? If not, check out the video there again. Before we had really started getting used to the idea of Web 2.0, researchers were talking about Web 3.0 - though actually it is usually now referred to as the "Semantic Web". And this concept of the web really does start to sound more like the "birth of the Matrix" - could that be a prequel to that wonderful series?

Humans can use the web to find specific information that they want because they understand what is written on each web page. Thus, whilst a search engine can find all the web pages with "matrix" written on them, only humans can easily distinguish those pages that are about the film "The Matrix" rather than about mathematics. The semantic web is a vision in which webpages are "understood" by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.

Here is Tim Berners Lee (father of the World Wide Web) talking about the Semantic Web:

And here is another short introduction to the semantic web. All source material is on the Digital Bazaar wiki

More on the semantic web.