Technology Trends #7 - Scuba Diving the Web

The seventh post in the series on Technology Trends discusses the long awaited trend of machine readable data and how that can be applied to create a new range of context aware applications

The web will graduate from the Corporate Web (organizations create brochure and transactional websites) to the Deep Web where user generated content and data resident in databases becomes index-able and available to those with sufficient authority

As computational power is focused on extracting meaning from data, particularly in making orthogonal connections; and that the web2.0 ‘wisdom of the crowd’ phenomenon of tagging is creating a new Semantic Web, where each atom of data will be accompanied by meta-data that adds context and value to it

When context is applied to raw data it becomes information (i.e. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”). When information is indexed in association with user goals, it becomes Knowledge. As the sheer volume of data available to analyze becomes too vast to contemplate, any user trying to make sense of the data to make a business decision will require a filter on that data. A new type of web application will allow such a filter to be placed and this filter will be not only dynamically reconfigurable, but will learn from how the user applies it – such a tool could be termed an ‘intelligent browser’.

Semantically enabled search engines such as Google Rich Snippets and Kosmix will favor sites that are semantically enabled and the rush to 'semantify' will begin.

As the Relational Database fails to efficiently accommodate richer data forms, new structures will be invented to enable such data to be efficiently stored, processed and retrieved. Semantic Databases will maintain the data, liquid relationships and manage the new transactional types that will occur

Technology Trends #7 - Scuba Diving the Web

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