The Web solved a frustration, made life easier, created solutions for us and gave us a lot of information a lot faster.

It is my understanding that the semantic web has the potential to be a whole new shift all over again, to solve problems and provide solutions for our current frustrations. I’ve done quite a bit of reading on this topic, but must admit that the concept is still proving to be quite elusive and rather technical. Internet founder Tim Berners Lee said it holds both huge potential for enterprises as well as a very exciting long term.

In this article he claimed that Google could be superseded as THE preeminent online brand by a company that harnesses the power of next generation web technology.
This article also defines semantic web with some clarity, “The semantic web is the term used by the computer and internet industry to describe the next phase of the web’s development, and essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data - not just a web page - so that it can “communicate” with other information.”

This week Yahoo announced a shift to adopt some of the key standards of semantic web. “The company said it would start to include some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for Yahoo search.” Read latest news about this here

“Calais” is powered by Reuters and the tagline states, “We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the semantic web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.”
So, lets see….

First Stop:
Wikipedia on Semantic Web.
“The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.”

Stop Two: Readwriteweb, 11 things to know about Semantic Web

Stop Three: And if you are over reading, see if you can gain some understanding of Semantic Web from this YouTube video, Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web

Bonus for those with ample time: Also check this one out from Google Tech Talks on YouTube if you are up for a full 50 minute lecture!