The announcement by Yahoo! Search of an open search ecosystem on March 13 is a step in the direction of search aligning with data
While there has been remarkable progress made toward understanding the semantics of web content, the benefits of a data web have not reached the mainstream consumer. Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site owners have been reluctant to support standards like RDF, or even microformats. We believe that app can be web search.
By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers.
It's a step in the right direction. Third party developers will be able to work on the open search platform. An open system holds greater promise for site-owners to help make search results listings much more relevant for the people who are searching.
We've just scratched the surface on search. In a recent article on Times Online, Tim Bernes-Lee himself talked about how the next generation of Web technology will help create a seamless web of all the data in your life. A passionate conversation ensued in the comments - 151 of them. Bye bye Google, hello semantic Web.
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.
"At the moment, people are very excited about all these connections being made between people — for obvious reasons, because people are important — but I think after a while people will realise that there are many other things you can connect to via the web."
I for one am very fond of connections made between people. And agree with Mr. Bernes-Lee on the security risks we'll need to watch for as more and more information moves online. Perhaps we could infuse the term authority with the connotation that a community would give it - permission to contribute where you can, communicate when you can, and participate what you can [hat tip to Chris Brogan for this part of the conversation].
Last year I talked about Artificial Intelligence Agents as Discovery Channels. Marketing Technologist Scott Brinker asks: "This seems like it will herald the next generation of SEO. Call it SEO++ (because it is sort of object-oriented)?" How about it? Marketing and the semantic Web. This is pretty big news.
In the words of Avinash Kaushik, Context is King, Baby! Go Get Your Own.