News Item Dated: 16 October 2002
From: InformationWeek  (10/14/02) No. 910; Ewalt, David M.

Search engines are very limited when it comes to sifting through a mountain of data that is increasing steadily, but the Semantic Web could make finding information easier; such a development would make employees more productive and companies easier for customers to find, according to Adrenaline Group CTO Alden Hart. Taking meanings and syntax of human speech as its foundation, the Semantic Web would probably consist of tags embedded within HTML documents that tell computers the meaning of Web pages, enabling them to see relationships between terms via specialized dictionaries. The Semantic Web could also facilitate more automated monitoring of corporate financial performance, such as tipping off investors and regulators to incidences of insider trading, notes Enigmatec CTO Duncan Johnson-Watt.

Semantic Web development issues will be a key area of study at IBM's Institute of Search and Text Analysis, says Nelson Mattos of IBM Research; however, Google and Microsoft are holding back on Semantic Web investment until successful applications emerge. Autonomy and other companies are pushing products and services that offer alternative means of processing unstructured information -- for instance, Autonomy software, which scans text with pattern-matching algorithms, is being used in an integrated portal undergoing testing at the University of Maryland's R.H. Smith School of Business. Challenges that the Semantic Web currently faces include getting enough users and vendors to agree to standards and protocols that will govern its operations. Semantic Web development is being led by the World Wide Web Consortium, whose chief supporters are MIT, France's INRIA, the European Union, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Keio University in Japan.

Interested? For further reading, check out this link: http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20021010S0016