Semantic Web

[The Pezman]

Alright, this one goes out to you high-end technophiles and Computer Scientists.

I'm doing my senior project on this emerging web technology. I didn't hear about it til the director of Academic Technology suggested it to me, and now I've gotten fairly excited. It tags words with actual meaning, so you can search by more than simple keyword and actually find things related to what you were searching for simply through the semantic meaning. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with it, but I'll be using the APIs for Freebase and OpenCalais. If DJP is reading this, I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to semantically tag the remixes at some point, though admittedly the technology is still a little young. At some point, though.

[Shadow Wolf]

Could you clarify? Most words have actual meanings, otherwise they're collections of letters. Are you saying it tags based on the contaxt the word is used in or what?

[The Pezman]

Bingo. Every word does have a meaning, but at this point the computer doesn't know what they are. The whole idea behind semantic web is to fix that, and use context in order to disambiguate multiple meanings. When a query is presented to a semantic search engine, it still employs some text matching, but there's a greater emphasis on looking for synonyms, morphologies (different forms of the given word), and other related attributes in order to bring you the most accurate results immediately. Cognition Wikipedia is one example (and it beats out its Freebase-based counterpart), and Parallax is another.