The smart web and open data
Posted Mai 14th, 2009 by bishophSearch engines like Google and Yahoo want to understand the web. They want to dive into (microformat/RDFa) formatted data to provide better search results. The BBC article talks about "smarter search". As of today, searching and browsing the web gives me some insight to topics that are not related to a search term at all. Some of them are interesting and let me thinking laterally... Of course, the semantic web will have some major benefits - product search comes in my mind.
Personally I'm more exited about the fact that everyone can work/modify/combine the data. In a social world where you trust your peers more than anybody else, think about what does it mean if anybody can re-create raw/processable data - but before we reach this question, I would find it it smart to define a standard for open and structured data beforehand. But we are in an agile world and Google defines the format for us and the Drupal/Wordpress teams are already working on some kind of implementation.
Hope that the benefit of all the efforts can be combined and the user gets a benefit. Just read that we got a name for the whole thing: Web 3.0. Here is the article: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/understanding_the_new_web_era_web_3...