Can the Semantic Web save us from drowning in data?
For years we've said "content is king". The promise of the web was that we'd have so much more data that we'd be able to make truly informed decisions. But it appears now that we are generating too much data, and we have no good way to understand or integrate all of the data that we have collected. We are literally drowning in data, as individuals, as businesses, as a culture. The amount of media that is available to the average citizen is vastly greater than at any time in history. With Google now indexing 'Tweets' we are on the verge of an internet with trillions of pages of information that are all indexed and available... but only useful if we can figure out the right search query. We desperately need to structure all this data; we need to find the relationships. The Semantic Web promises to automatically discover the relationships for us. On the Semantic Web content may not be all there is, rather, CONTEXT may be "king".
Web 3.0 by Kate Ray - This 15-minute film is a pretty good general overview of the semantic web. That is, turning all of the data on the web into structured data so as to define relationships between it and derive meaning... The video includes interviews with Dixon, Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Nova Spivack, Jason Shellen, Lee Feigenbaum, John Hebeler, Alon Halevy, David Karger, and Abraham Bernstein.
