Wednesday, June 6, 2007

semantic web: a question

Does the semantic web--which I feebly understand as language that is understandable to humans as well as to machines--fit into a discussion about metadata?

I feel like the reason there aren't so many papers about metadata anymore is that people have made the leap to new concepts, or new faddish terminology, but I have no idea.

1 comment:

Peaches said...

After reading one wikipedia article, I think that the semantic web does have its place in a metadata discussion.

As it is, the web is designed to be read by humans, not machines. The computer is unable to comprehend what is on the screen. For instance, while the computer knows that it is at lis875metadata.blogspot.com, it has no idea what is on this page. The semantic web essentially incorporates a sort of universal metadata to make the content of all the pages on the web understandable to computers.

Hypothetically, this will make the web more efficient than it is now. If someone wants to know how this is supposed to happen, I can either explain it (if you don't like technical articles) or you can look at the wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web