A Better Search

The semantic Web was envisioned to make information understandable by both people and machines, writes David Bradley at Sciencebase. He speaks with Nikolaos Konstantinou, one of the authors of a new paper called "Technically approaching the semantic web bottleneck," about how the semantic Web can be helpful. Konstantinou tells him that it will allow for better searches — for example, he says that searching for "renaissance painters" wouldn't be limited to pages with those keywords as the system would know which painters worked during the Renaissance. In addition, the system would be able to deduce information through logical reasoning, given certain starting facts. "Such a system, when asked 'is socrates mortal?' will return a YES, while without reasoning the answer would be NO (or UNKNOWN in other cases)," Bradley writes.