You sexy beast. Ok, inappropriate. How about: Web of links to Web of Meaning Hello Semantic Web!

Semantic Web for Dummies, then over to the experts What it is Why it’s helpful Who’s doing it Why it’s helpful for publishers The jargon

No really, what is it? Often referred to as the next phase of the web. Web 3.0 Berners Lee: a highly interconnected network of data that could be easily accessed and understood by any desktop or handheld machine. If web2.0 is about people (being part of community and connecting to each other then Web 3.0 is for machines and connections between data (for the benefit of people)

Or my favorite: Semantic Web technology can help answer a question when you don’t know what to ask for. BUT, It’s also a fluid, evolving concept rather than an integrated working system.

Themes of Semantic Web indexing/retrieving information Metadata Annotation Web as large, interoperable database Machine retrieval of data Web-based services Intelligent software agents contextualization and meaning draw logical conclusions (inferencing) digest natural language comply with W3C standards

The Jargon URI’s (uniform resource identifiers) each and every “thing” has a standard name and a permanent place to be referenced RDF and OWL – language and syntax to describe relationships between things (incl. ontologies) GRDDL gleans and extracts RDF data from web pages SPARQL – language for querying semantically compliant data

Semantic Applications in Alpha or Beta Powerset (Microsoft) - search and discover information in Wikipedia articles. Hakia - Ontological semantic and natural language processing (NLP) based search engine. TrueKnowledge “Internet Answer Engine” Swoogle, Sindice, SWSE, Falcon-S, and Watson Dbpedia - A community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. Silobreaker is a search service for news and current affairs that aims to provide more relevant results to the end. Metaweb’s Freebase – open, shared database of knowledge Twine automatically organizes information, learns about your interests and makes connections and recommendations. The more you use Twine, the better it understands your interests and the more useful it becomes. Yahoo’s Searchmonkey Yahoo! Search's new open platform

Ok…and…? Adding Semantic flavor to your site involves adding machine- readable metadata to content that give relationships and meaning. It could involve tagging on the backend or the public site

Why should publishers care? It allows servers to find, extract, share and re-use information. It gives context to the tags in your articles and allows you to do more with your content without human effort, like build up an index of people or call up a map with the mentioned locations automatically It helps search engines deliver more relevant and accurate results

Read more here ReadWriteWeb Paul Miller on ZDNet