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.