I’ve been spelunking in the rabbit hole known as the “Semantic Web” for awhile now, and things are really heating up between work and my extracurricular pursuits in this area. It’s been a long time coming, mostly because the concept of machine knowledge is difficult to explain to most people. Now that most Internet-savvy users have had an opportunity to become familiar with the concept of “tagging” their bookmarks or photographs or blogs, they have more experience to hang the concept of machine knowledge from.

Additionally, much of the theoretical research in this area is moving towards practical and applicable solutions. The demand is there, and has been since the early days of “data warehousing,” when technology architects realized that stretching traditional relational databases across myriad content repositories wasn’t so easily accomplished. Now we have the evolution of frameworks to facilitate this concept of distributed data as well as the cheap storage and computing resources to index and search it.

I’ll point you at two links relevant to this post. The first is from Nova Spivack, by way of mi2g. Nova is basically claiming that Web 3.0 is “ready” to take it’s place among the buzzwords of our day.

The second is from the Wikipedia entry on Web 3.0 which was created on March 4th, 2007.

We all knew it was inevitable.

Incidentally, I’m watching web3.0, knowledgeautomation, and semanticweb tags over at Del.icio.us. I’m logged in there as “wwward0” if you want to keep up with what I’m looking at or trade links. I’m sure there is a Typepad portlet/part/panel which I’ll add later when I can spare the cycles.