If you are looking for something on the Internet, you swish out your favorite search engine or toolbar, and enter your search text there. You get the results, which are not exactly what you wanted. You tweak the search text, play around with words and try again. Better results, this time. A few such efforts later, you find exactly what you are looking for!


Now imagine, if the search itself could intelligently figure out what you want and get the right information you have been searching for, in a jiffy! That’s what the Web will be like in a few years. Welcome to Web 3.0! It is also called the “Semantic Web”. Web 3.0 refers to a way which enables computers to read web pages, understand what they mean and help us find what we want, far more effectively than what is possible today.


The Web is growing exponentially. It evolved from the readable phase with static HTML pages, where data could only be read, to a writable phase, Web 2.0, which allows interactive data handling, and user-generated content. We live Web 2.0 with our social networking sites and blogs and wikis. The evolution continues with Web 3.0, which is now being heralded as the “executable” phase and includes dynamic web applications, interactive services and machines talking to machines.


The Semantic Web is a collaborative effort led by the W3 Consortium and promoted by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. So what does Semantic Web really mean?


The Web of today is about HTML documents which displays web pages using a particular syntax. Computers retrieve information without knowing the meaning behind the web pages. This is because computers understand the syntax but not the semantics of the web page. By embedding semantics in a web page, we can make computers understand what things like a person, place or event mean and also find the relationship between them. In this way the standard Web of today turns into the semantic Web of tomorrow.


Web 3.0 uses semantic technology which equips computers with seeming intelligence to search and analyze the content online. By understanding the relationship between various objects, web pages become machine readable content.


If you perform a regular search today, you will get thousands of random links based on the keywords you provide. But using semantics, the web performs an intelligent search and returns only meaningful results along with events or activities associated with it.


For example if you look up a particular disease, the web will return symptoms of the disease and also help you locate a physician, make an appointment, look for alternate medicine avenues and so forth.


In this way, semantic web data can be manipulated and correlated to find solutions for a particular case. Thus by teaching computers how to interpret data, they can actively help us find the right information and make decisions.


Semantics can be embedded in web pages using a technology called RDF (Resource Description Framework) which forms the basic standard for data interchange.


The Web of today is being envisioned as a collaborative Web of the future which will lead to new possibilities of artificial intelligence and advanced computer applications.