Semantic Web: Utopia or Future?

Semantic Web: Utopia or Future?

Last week I've finish reading a book, called The Search, which is a good reading about the concept of information search on the internet. This is definitely a very interesting book, which also includes many references to google's engine and company.

While reading this book - which I recommend - I stumbled with a term, Semantic Web. I've heard about it, but wasn't really sure about what it was. After reading the book and a few documents on the web I'm more enlightened about the subject and felt like writing a bit about it.

As a side note, this month won't be a DDD series post. After all the last one, Software Developing: Domain Driven Design, looking at Persistence is still hot (I do suggest to anyone interested in the subject to read the comments and even join the discussion)! But more can be expected next month, probably about transactions.

Now back to our subject, let's start with a wikipedia quote:

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.
Source

Extracting the essential information, the semantic web is a concept where web objects (pages, images, videos, etc) have meaning associated with information. A special meaning, one that can be understood by machines.
This is an utopian idea, but it definitely would be a great thing to achieve! One of the areas that would get way better would be information search. The possibility of having searches that aren't just keyword based but actually semantic based, or even having a search engine that could make inference in content it amazes me. IBM as a project called WebFoutain which has this kind of ambitions.
But search engines already use meta-information, though it's due to applying algorithms to the collected data in order to extract relevant information. With the semantic web these algorithms would be replaced by simple harvesting of meta-information and ontologies - Simplifying, ontology can be seen has a taxonomy who also supports relation between taxa, the taxonomy units. Then on top of that, an inference engine!

But is it a practical thing? There are people who believe semantic web will fail… Even I have some doubts about it.. The web grows at an alarming rate and most of the content hasn't much meta-information associated to it. Pay attention that I said hasn't much, because lately a simple way of attributing meta-information to content has become a successful hype, the tagging systems. Tagging, which can be seen in various websites, is far away from true Semantic Web, a simple drop in the ocean, yet could be a start.

Now a futuristic idea, let's merge semantic web with the idea of ubiquitous computing, where the computers are present in everything that surrounds human beings - a concept I'm very fond of and that we're not so far away from achieving. Any interaction a person has with anything is processed by a computer, given a certain semantic and stored in that person profile. Now when a certain person access a given website or a search engine, that profile could be retrieved (with granted authorization) in order to define what was more relevant for that person. Isn't it an excellent scenario? Well it can or cannot be one. I must admit that, even if it fascinates me, I also am a bit reluctant specially regarding all the personal information gathering and possible misuse of such information.

But even if this scenario seems far away, think twice. Nowadays google show relevant ads at gmail by processing the email messages, or shows relevant ads on the search's results using the search query and also the click-stream. Indeed this is a small scenario, limited to google's domain accessing only a small part of information that can put some context to the visitor, now we just scale this to a world where any stimulus a person made could be accessed and catalogued in order to give context.
Privacy will definitely have a major role in all these subjects, since each person would want to say what stimulus would or wouldn't be allowed to share..

Being a rather complex concept, maybe it has to change before it gets truly usable, still I think what we should ask is: Semantic Web, utopia or future?