Future of semantic web

When I first heard about the semantic web in class I was intrigued by the power of this concept. It’s interesting to think about the possibility of organizing the information of the Internet in such a way that the web can interpret its own content.

In the beginning, I thought that the idea of an intelligent Internet would be sort of science fiction, but if you think about it, there are some versions of this idea already implemented. Communications intelligence has been there for some years and its objective is to monitor all sort of communications and identify those emails, telephone conversations, faxes, … that can represent a threat. These are completely automated mechanisms and the algorithms that make this happen are becoming more and more sophisticated.

Semantic web would make these algorithms more efficient given that the information is organized and therefore easier to understand. This will represent in my opinion a revolution in IT, some sort of “web 3.0” The number of applications can be endless.
For example, many traders use momentum strategy to invest. They read the newspapers and interpret signals before earning announcements to buy long or sell sort a particular stock. Say now, that you can subscribe to a news feeder and run an algorithm to know if the news are very positive, relatively positive, neutral, relatively negative or very negative. The algorithm would invest accordingly. Investment strategy is far more complicated than this, but you can get the idea.

Think about the applications in search (asking questions instead of writing keywords), marketing (interpreting what users write about your products), …