Semantic Web

Has anyone else started to notice words underlined in blue popping up all over the place? Call it tagging, call it tangent provoking, call it Semantic Webbing, whatever you call it, it brings exciting prospects. As Andy Carvin writes,

The decentralized nature of the Web makes it very difficult for any of us, including researchers, to understand how it all fits together. There’s no single repository of all Web content, nor is there one search engine that makes it possible for us to find everything we might wish to find. Even the biggest search engines like Google only manage to capture a fraction of everything that’s actually out there.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the physicist who developed the web 17 years ago as a way of sharing knowledge with his colleagues... has spent the last several years trying to improve our ability to search the Internet and find the information we need through an ongoing initiative called the Semantic Web. Essentially, the Semantic Web seeks to add more meaning to the knowledge we put online, so that knowledge can be better understood by machines: search engines, online social networks, software, etc. If machines can understand it better, than we can put it all to better use.

Basically, as it stands the internet is organized in a sort of dictionary or encyclopedia fashion at best. The thought of organizing and linking web content by meaning is actually much more exciting than some may think. Current models in Cognitive Psychology show that the human lexicon and memory in general are organized semantically. For example, when you hear the word "spider," the words "web, charlot, black, widow, spin" and many others are automatically activated in memory. The problem is, unlike your human brain and understanding, a computer doesn't actually know what a spider is or that a spider has anything to do with a web, the name Charlot, or spinning. That's why semantic tagging, webbing, organizing, and searching will be so useful. Instead of searching for key words, titles, quotations, we will be able to search with actual meaning.

Making an argument that this will be of service to education almost seems like a mute point. Point taken, it will make the internet's information more searchable, more accessable and more useful. More searchable, accessable, useful information will certainly be of great service to students and teachers of all educational levels. It won't be the ultimate fix or euphoria, (the junk content that we always have to sort through will still be in the mix) but it certainly will make search critera more "meaningful"... sorry about the pun.

The Semantic Web and the Online Educational Experience
November 3, 2006
by Andy Carvin, 11:12AM
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