A report from analyst company Deloitte shows that the amount of information in many organizations is doubling every 18 months. Companies and organizations are being overloaded: they have difficulty categorizing the data and finding the right information both for internal use and when addressing customers. 

The semantic web was initiated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an industry group dedicated to building consensus around web technologies.

Ivan Herman is leading the semantic web research group at W3C. He says:

“More and more industries are starting to realize the benefits of the semantic web and there are already a lot of interesting examples of applications and business cases.”

The main aim is to create simplified ways to integrate various forms of both public and private data from companies, organizations and communities. There are several technologies powering the semantic web, with the Resource Description Framework (RDF) at the center: developed by W3C, it allows the creation of relationships between many different forms of data on the web.

The content on existing websites can be understood by humans but not by computers, which leads to limited search results. Search engines, for example, cannot differentiate between people’s names and street names. RDF technology will allow computers to understand such differences. The technology works automatically and is invisible to the user.

“It is similar to the way we are used to web pages being linked to each other,” Herman says. “But instead of making people do the search and evaluate the information, the technology behind the semantic web can do much of the work, labeling, evaluating, comparing and integrating different kinds of information and presenting the result for the user.”

Herman cites a range of industries that can take advantage of the technology to improve their operations, such broadcasting, universities, the financial industry, e-government, healthcare, the IT industry and the telecoms sector. The W3C has published 37 case studies on its homepage describing how the semantic web can be integrated into different kinds of applications and activities.

“We try to cooperate with many different types of communities,” Herman says. “Take the health and pharmaceutical industries, as well as hospitals, which are creating a huge amount of data in different formats and in different databases. In many cases they need to use a combination of all these data and that is exactly what the semantic web can be used for.”

In Norway, national broadcaster NRK has used the semantic web to improve access to its enormous music library. Another interesting example is a mobile content-recommendation system created in South Korea, which includes the semantic web and the IP Multimedia Subsystem. The system gathers information on user behavior and habits, and uses that information to recommend new services and content for each individual user.

The growing number of social networking sites is also a great example of web services that can benefit from the semantic web. One of the most recent examples is Twine, a social bookmarking system that can be used to collaborate, manage, organize and share information. It enables users to store links, e-mail conversations, text documents, images and video clips. Twine is using semantic-web capabilities to evaluate and categorize information, making it easy for users to find material stored by others.

“The benefits are obvious,” Herman says. “The more information and data we create, the more we need to organize it and find ways to simplify the handling. The semantic web takes care of that and gives companies, organizations and users better means to actually take advantage of advanced information from a combination of information sources.”

Hendrik Bergstén