Get ready for ‘The Semantic Web’. That’s the message coming out of this week’s WWW2006 event in Edinburgh. 

Scotland’s capital city this week played host to WWW2006, the 15th International World Wide Web Conference. It seems the major development to emerge at the event is more of a phenomenon than a mere technology.

The World Wide Web? Tag it and bag it. ‘The Semantic Web’ or ‘Web 2.0’ is heading this way. The Semantic Web is all about providing connections between fragments of information that mean something to computers as well as people.

It is what the venerable Tim Berners-Lee had in mind all along. Information resources can be “tagged for meaning” allowing whole swathes of the web to be searched, mined, analysed and otherwise picked over by roving bots and data hungry post-grad students. Seems like a lot of trouble to find an alternative recipe for clam chowder…

The explosive uptake of blogging and wikis has allowed online communities to engage actively in content creation. Now so-called ‘Resource Description Framework’ (RDF) tagging enables the content to be machine-read and repackaged for a particular audience, device or language.

“Online communities love tagging, and seem willing to embrace new technologies [that increase the accessibility and relevancy of their shared knowledge]”, says K. Faith Lawrence, University of Southampton. The University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science was responsible for organising WWW20006.

A team at Pennsylvania State University led by C. Lee Giles have found ways of graphically modelling relationships within e-communities by examining the semantic patterns within the Enron email dataset. The notion here is that what people say to each other is more significant than how often they communicate (more significant, in some cases, in determining guilt?).

Let the engineers lead, get better technology…
It emerged that there is a growing feeling that the often cumbersome and bureaucratic process by which the W3C working groups arrive at recommendations for standards is under-rated by the industry as a whole. W3C’s supporters increasingly believe that it delivers better thought-out solutions than those tabled by individual corporations.

An inside source at Google suggests the reason why nobody seems able to predict Google’s next steps is they do not allow the marketing department to dictate release dates. “Everything is engineer led; we do not release technologies until the engineers are happy for users to try them.” This is a policy that has done Google no harm, it would seem.

Also at the event, Narichika Hamaguchi of the Science and Technical Research Laboratories at NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) demonstrated a very elegant and entertaining system for creating video blogs. This uses text scripts to generate a 3D animated studio complete with animated presenters who deliver their lines and introduce programme segments just like real TV presenters (but without the egos).

It would appear that the demographic that create and tag content in the new improved world of Web 2.0 includes a substantial number of older ladies (a group traditionally way down the list of target audiences for websites). Ask your maiden Aunt what she’s been blogging… Otherwise, to see what the notion of online communities can actually mean, click here.

Coming soon…?
The Semantic Web is clearly a work in progress and, as alluded to above, that progress can be slow. The sheer weight of development muscle behind Web 2.0 suggests, however, that it’s coming, sooner or later. The emphasis on communities of interest and communities of information for the take-up of these new features and functions of the Web is clear to see.

To see how far things have progressed, WWW2007 will be held next year in Banff, Canada. Edinburgh… Banff? Whatever else, these people certainly know how to choose beautiful locations for their get-togethers.
Danny Owens