I’m engaged those days with semantic web at one of my client site and I must admit that it’s fascinated field. The idea behind semantic web is pretty simple: instead of using artificial intelligence in order to enable the machine to understand web context lets use semantic and ontology while writing pages context. Sounds like since fiction, well it’s not! The w3c has been working on several standards to support semantic web over the last years. They already defined standards for Resource Description Language (RDL) and Ontology Web Language (OWL). There is also some work that being done in that field by DARPA (DAML).
RDL: enable to split web content into triplets. Each triplet contains subject, verb and object. Each triplet object is defined by URI to prevent ambiguous. For example Person (subject), is father of (verb), another person (object).
OWL: helps to indicate that two different concepts identifying by different URI are actually the same in given document, setting relations between entities and setting rules between entities. The rules actually enable systems to deduce.
To sum it up, there is much of work in that field but it’s not mature yet. If you want to learn more on that field refer to http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ .
What I have to do with it? Well this client is data centric organization. Data is their aim assets and they are working all the time to gather more data and analyze it. The problem is that they can’t reach accurate information from the raw data if they use artificial intelligence tools. So nowadays we are trying to find out how we can adopt w3c standards and build infrastructure to support those standards in order to create our own semantic intranet.