I work with semantic analysis technology (no, it isn't profitable), and think this is a really good summary.
The useful applications long-term are in areas like machine translation (contextual semantic knowledge is important), document categorization and indexing for search (ie. semantic data-scraping). Indexing for search is the simplest of the bunch and the most likely use of the tech that we'll see soon.
RWW has it right that the major challenge this poses to Google is a proliferation of industry specific applications that monetize better information management by virtue of knowing exactly what their users want and figuring out creative ways to aggregate it. Google is particularly weak with multiple languages: their focus on language-agnostic translation tools makes them vulnerable in foreign markets.
Then again, if Google provides the tools to let these vertical portals manage their own on-site advertising, who cares who is doing the actual document indexing/analysis?
It's been a really long time since I looked at this kind of stuff in any detail. The librarians I worked with at university would go on and on about semantic markup, and there were some very dedicated users that seemed to be willing to slog through the SGML nightmare. But, as soon as HTML came out it swamped the other technologies because it was so easy for people.
Has anything changed since the SGML days? Rhetorically, it all still sounds like a bunch of librarians complaining woefully that they can't do search properly if no one marks up their data properly.
Nothing much has changed. Most of the talk about the semantic web is complete hot air. It isn't as if this stuff is counterintuitive or non-obvious -- it's just that no-one wants to go through the work of teaching machines to understand language/text without a way to profit from it.
The useful applications long-term are in areas like machine translation (contextual semantic knowledge is important), document categorization and indexing for search (ie. semantic data-scraping). Indexing for search is the simplest of the bunch and the most likely use of the tech that we'll see soon.
RWW has it right that the major challenge this poses to Google is a proliferation of industry specific applications that monetize better information management by virtue of knowing exactly what their users want and figuring out creative ways to aggregate it. Google is particularly weak with multiple languages: their focus on language-agnostic translation tools makes them vulnerable in foreign markets.
Then again, if Google provides the tools to let these vertical portals manage their own on-site advertising, who cares who is doing the actual document indexing/analysis?