Future Wave Web Technology Blog

In ear­lier post­ings I have writ­ten about the Semantic Web.  It is inter­est­ing to me that in my recent work in the area of web tech­nolo­gies that there would be such an over­lap with my inter­est in writ­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions.  The seman­tic web tech­nolo­gies are chang­ing the web in very excit­ing ways.  In sim­ple terms this is mak­ing the web smarter.

 

When peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate and when com­put­ers com­mu­ni­cate there is a syn­tax to that com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  Until recently, the seman­tics of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion was not made known in a way that com­put­ers could under­stand.  Applications on the web have given the impres­sion that they under­stood what you meant, the seman­tics, by allow­ing you to ask ques­tions and seem to get answers in the way of web­sites or a search engine might respond to your search with this state­ment, “Did you mean…?”  However, in terms of the web, for the most part, none of these web­sites had any mean­ing embed­ded into them, at least noth­ing that would help a com­puter pro­gram to under­stand what was on the web page.  They just have infor­ma­tion to allow a browser to know how to dis­play the con­tent for human view­ers to understand.

 

This leads to the topic of syn­tax.  Syntax is about struc­ture, the struc­ture of sen­tences and phrases in English.  Written com­mu­ni­ca­tion in English is struc­tured with gram­mar, spelling and punc­tu­a­tion.  Similarly, when we speak much of that struc­ture also exists in the way we speak.  Punctuation is artic­u­lated, some­times, with pauses, for example. 

 

A def­i­n­i­tion if syn­tax from the web­site reference.dictionary.com is as fol­lows: “Computers. the gram­mat­i­cal rules and struc­tural pat­terns gov­ern­ing the ordered use of appro­pri­ate words and sym­bols for issu­ing com­mands, writ­ing code, etc., in a par­tic­u­lar soft­ware appli­ca­tion or pro­gram­ming lan­guage. “¹  So, in terms of the web, we have web pages that are pre­sented in the browser using dif­fer­ent lan­guages or markup code.  There is also a struc­ture to the way the browser requests the web page from the web server.  There are rules that define how this com­mu­ni­ca­tion must be struc­tured.  This is the syn­tax of the communication. 

 

Semantics is about the mean­ing of what is being com­mu­ni­cated.  Before the seman­tic web started chang­ing things, there was vir­tu­ally noth­ing on a web page or in the code under­ly­ing a web page to tell a com­puter any­thing about the mean­ing of what was on the web page.  The com­puter, by way of the browser, knew how to dis­play the con­tent but had no under­stand­ing, as it were, of the seman­tics, the mean­ing of what was being communicated. 

The seman­tic web is not about teach­ing com­put­ers to speak and under­stand English or any lan­guage, per se.  Languages are a bit more com­plex than what would be required by the seman­tic web.  However, this is about includ­ing cod­ing the web page with infor­ma­tion about the mean­ing of what is con­tained on the web page.  This seman­tic code will not be dis­played to the viewer but it will be read by com­put­ers.   Some seman­tic web appli­ca­tions will involve what is called “nat­ural lan­guage pro­cess­ing” but there will be lim­its and require­ments to what can be said or asked.

 

By includ­ing seman­tic web tech­nol­ogy in web pages and in web appli­ca­tions, search engines will bet­ter help us find what we are seek­ing.  There are already some seman­tic search engines out there, such as what you will find at hakia.com  In addi­tion, just one other exam­ple of how this can help us is with the abil­ity to com­bine and reuse infor­ma­tion from var­i­ous sources.  Information can be pulled in from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sources and used in an entirely new way. 

More on this topic will be com­ing.  I find this very exciting. 

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This blog is pub­lished by Bruce Whealton, more infor­ma­tion about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company pro­vid­ing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs

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