"The only man I have to be better than, is who I am right now."
Prologue
Not only did Sgt. Pepper teach the band to play, but twenty years ago today (or so) Mr. Web was born. There was no great annunciation of his birth and indeed in the early years he wasn't even all that popular. Only a few people ever came to visit.
The mixed-up teenage years arrived and he was soon searching for what he would be when he grew up. Some advised him he needed to be more stylish. He tried this but could not separate out who he was from how he looked. Thankfully he soon sorted himself out and decided on an outside stylist to look after his appearance.
Of late, he's become quite the man about town and is socialising here, there and everywhere. A lot of these new friends seem keen to help build him up. This has occurred to such an extent that some have remarked that Mr. Web has undergone his own private renaissance and started calling him Web 2.0.
A seasoned traveller, in fact some even call him ‘World Wide Web', he has seen many things in his short life. What lies in wait for him over the next twenty years is anybody's guess. As Mr. Web has become one of the most knowledgeable people around, some might expect that Mr. Web will undergo a second rebirth. This will see him shift his focus to how he can best share this information with everyone who wants to ask him a question. Mr. Web is expecting a lot of questions.
Part One
The Web as we know it today is great but actually not as useful as it could be. HTML, which is the ‘language' of the Web, was originally meant to represent data i.e. what things were. Soon this got mixed-up (see Mr. Web's teenage years) with how that data should look. The semantic Web plans to reverse that. Pages on the Web will store data in much more detail than they currently do.
Let's say that you are on holiday and are trying to decide which restaurant to go to. You decide to show off and get out your mobile phone and bring up a list of restaurants. You quickly find some and get the telephone number to make a reservation. Next you search high and low for pencil so that you can write this number down and then enter it into your phone.
The problem is that the Web page doesn't know that the restaurant's contact details are an address. It just thinks it's a collection of letters like any other bit of text. Wouldn't it be great if the Web page knew that the contact details were an address and could simply let you add it to your contacts on your phone?
Enter the semantic Web – Web 3.0 if you like. This move has already started with such things as microformats. Microformats are great and do declare data but are really no more than a hack because they have to work with the Web as it is, not how it should be.
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