The Semantic Web

Web 3.0,or the semantic web, is a fascinating concept - and one I think librarians need to capitalize on immediately! Web 3.0 can be thought of as performing searches that involve many complex facets all pertaining to the same subject on a multitude of different databases (sites) - making the web one large database. While web 3.0 has been envisioned as something completely automated, it is also time consuming and presently beyond our technological capabilities. From the article Tim, Lucy, and the Semantic Web, "You get the ability to do all these very complex queries, but it takes a tremendous amount of time and metadata to make that happen."

I think this sounds like the perfect opportunity for librarians to grab a piece of the pie!

Managing and retrieving information/knowledge has always been a major task at hand for library professionals and knowledge management. To have software that would take any search or word or picture that we look at and then link to all the most pertinent data related to that piece of information with accuracy, would be a huge breakthrough.

But can computers and software manage this task alone?

Maybe. But the addition of human know-how, nuances in language or idioms that might take artificial intelligence time to catch onto, the ability to read a question deeper than the words on the page, that's where I believe librarians can, and should, be a part of.

In a recent article PC.mag article Why Google Must Die, the author mentions how SEO would affect an automated semantic web. There is a disconnect between what humans can make a system believe, and how humans can control what the systems does. This again, is what information professionals should be on the cutting edge of - if not right in the middle!

Food for thought, and I'm sure not the last time I will discuss this topic!

Some "web 3.0" sites to try out:

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Riya