Tom McDonald's post about Pandora inspired me to put up this post about "Semantic Web".
The main idea behind Semantic web is that not only would things be tagged on the internet, but the tags will be related to each other in an ontology. I believe the Pandora website uses this kind of technology.
The idea of giving machines more intelligence through linked or associated tags is a very powerful one. Imagine adding such tags to IPTV video content, and having a machine with the ability to analyze what you are watching and suggest new content or even make decisions about how a story might evolve for a particular viewer. If IPTV content was codified in such a way, imagine what this could mean for a provider trying to segment viewers for targeted advertising. This would allow for segmenting on viewing behavior that has channel changes every five minutes...segmenting on the "ideas" that a viewer prefers rather than merely the programs the viewer prefers!
Anyway, since we're talking about Web 2.0 let's bring "3.0?" into the discussion!
Critics argue that Semantic Web requires too much metadata and is too complex. However, a few metadata links in the right places could revolutionize industries.
Here is a link that talks more about Pandora:
http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=322
Here is another link with FAQs about Semantic Web:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ#What1
Here is the source of another recent article about Semantic Web:
An excellent article on Semantic Web can also be found in the March/April 2007 edition of MIT technology review. The article is called "A Smarter Web" by John Borland.
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1 comment:
Neat idea, but who does the tagging? There always will have to be a decision made on a human level, either to assign a tag or confirm an assigned tag. Either way, the human element will create greater error. In industries where consumers notice the 1 time a wrong message was sent as opposed to the 99 times a correctly related ad/viewing suggestion/etc. was sent, this will still create an inflated appearance of imperfection and unreliability. Something of which we have come to expect less and less of todays technology.
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