We’ve spent the last two decades creating and storing more and more information.
David Siegel author of the Power of Pull reckons that the computer generation has digitised more than 500 Exabytes (500 followed by 20 zeros) of data. Siegel was speaking at Thinking Digital yesterday.
“In five years time we’ll have generated more than 20 years that amount. We’re builder bigger and bigger electronic filing cabinets. We’re spending trillions of dollars replicating old systems,” said Siegel.
Without context data has limited value and requires human intervention.
Here’s an example. Ask Google “What’s the temperature in Venice”. The answer will be somewhere in the 1.4 million search results but you’ll have to search manually.
Now try Wolfram Alpha “What’s the temperature in Venice”. The single result that you’d expect is returned immediately. That’s because the data that the search engine searches has been marked-up semantically.
The semantic web is the unambiguous web where data has context because of the way it is marked-up.
During the next 30 years Siegel said that we’ll make a considerable leap in productivity because information on the web will be organised so that computers can understand its context and meaning.
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This needs more than a Tweet.
We are already getting some of the benefits of an emerging semantic web and there are several views about what that means. For some it is a constructionalist approach with a structured ontology and for others, like me, it has an organic future with more evolution than revolution.
It will happen, of that there is no doubt. As long as the internet is a thing of humans (and that is probably 30 years away when the number of links are as many as synapses in the human brain – if Kevin Kelly is to be believed), the internet will obey the human need and the human need in many cases will be the need for an answer in the case you show above.
But there are other needs, of which the most potent after survival, nourishment and procreation is the company of mankind.
The answer you really want is the one given by Many and Gill standing on the Palace steps who will both tell the temperature and, for some, raise it.
This means that the semantic web is also a challenge for PR because it can mean so many more actors having a role in building relationships.
Wholly agree with you David. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.