Recently, I stumbled upon a comment (Norwegian) about the semantics of Web 2.0 technologies, which prompted a response.

Since the response turned out rather lengthy, and a bit off-topic, I decided to post it here. Hopefully, it can be of use to others as well.

Web 2.0

Although the Web 2.0 has been hyped as something big and new for a while now, and things such as tag clouds are a popular part of many Web 2.0 sites, Web 2.0 sites build on old technologies (+user generated content). It’s all just (X)HTML + JavaScript and CSS. No magic.

There is not much semantics to Web 2.0. The semantics of HTML is still limited to layout/presentation of information (as will HTML5‘s be). Even though one can express the start/end of a paragraph or heading, one can for example not explicitly state what an article is about (except through limited meta elements), or how different “topics” — or even what kind of topics we’re talking about — are related.

There is no way to explicitly state that “this article is about X and mentions Y”.

The tag clouds of Web 2.0 are in effect just free-floating words, and do as such not bring anything new to the table (an exception is Roy Lachica’s Fuzzzy.com where tags are structured in an ontology using Topic Maps).

The Semantic Web

The last couple of years / decade, people have been working towards a more “intelligent” web (although hardly intelligent); the semantic web. Such a web, often referred to as Web 3.0, adds the possibility of expressing semantics outside the limited domain of (X)HTML (or micro formats).

This is accomplished through adding layers of metadata to the web. The semantic web is therefore an extension (not replacement) of todays web, where different technologies, like Topic Maps and RDF/OWL, allow us to express anything about any subject – in a structured, explicit and unambiguous manner. I.e.: not limited to the element set of a given vocabular.

By doing so, one can (hopefully) bring order to the chaos, and develop better applications. Luckily, the technologies are already there, and by using Topic Maps one can e.g. boost findability.

For more on the semantic web or Topic Maps, see e.g.:

• Wikipedia – Semantic Web
  
• Wikipedia – Web 3.0
• TopicMap.com – Resources