The Semantic Web - the structure that will enable us to see connections between databases and gather information with less effort - is getting closer. This article describes the objectives, the progress, the players in making smarter tools for organizing and finding information. Ontologies are involved as are user-generated tagsonomies.
"The Semantic Web community's grandest visions, of data-surfing computer servants that automatically reason their way through problems, have yet to be fulfilled. But the basic technologies that Miller shepherded through research labs and standards committees are joining the everyday Web. They can be found everywhere--on entertainment and travel sites, in business and scientific databases--and are forming the core of what some promoters call a nascent "Web 3.0.""
The writer traces the history to organize information from Melvil Dewey's days, through the early days of directories on the Web, and the increasing acceptance of using metadata to describe information objects.
Eric Miller, an MIT-affiliated computer scientist, has been one of the contributors to furthering "semantic web" enabling technologies.
Meanwhile, social tagging has been gaining acceptance imposing a "grassroots order" on collections.
"No one knows what organizational technique will ultimately prevail. But what's increasingly clear is that different kinds of order, and a variety of ways to unearth data and reuse it in new applications, are coming to the Web. There will be no Dewey here, no one system that arranges all the world's digital data in a single framework."
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