Semantic Technology-Web 3.0
Every once in awhile when I am surfing though some site, I find myself asking “How did it know that? Amazon has done a version of it all for years by telling me what I should purchase based on what I looked at or just recently purchased.
Semantic technology is a the foundation of what will become web 3.0. “The Semantic Web, in which elements of Web pages are labeled with computer-readable coding to help computers better understand the meaning of the content, has been around for years. It’s only now beginning to gain adoption as a real-world technology because of two big reasons, though: Yahoo and Google.”
Understanding who we are everytime we approach the web and intuitively interacting with our interests is going to open a whole new way of building web sites and driving content. It is going to allow us to engage with people in an online world just by virtue of their clicks.
It seems to me that ministry in a semantic driven world will allow us to answer questions before they are asked. It will allow us to deliver content with multiple paths of interactivity. It will allow us to understand the people that we minister to and connect them in new and innovative ways to materials and forums and communities that are very uniquely designed to meet their needs.
The most advantageous characteristic of the semantic, web 3.0 environment is that it will allow us to “study” our people and respond in very rapid strokes.
The day of pouring content out of a firehose via mailings and classes and web sites and hoping something sticks is nearing an end. In the days to come, people will only want to get what they want and need. They will rely on filters to sort it all out before it even shows up on their radar.
The days of being generic are going away. But the opportunities for effectiveness will grow to whole new levels.
What will you do with that?
Leveraging What's Next...Now 
My big question is: Who is better at deciding what content I want? A computer or me? I find in many cases a computer generated recommendation based on even very detailed tags of that content does not really reflect what I actually want.
The best example of this is music recommendation. I’m not sure there is any media on the web that has been more meticulously tagged and categorized, but music recommendation has, so far, only served to severely narrow the number of discoverable media. That on top of the bogus recommendations.
Discerning content recommendation by cataloging users’ content consumption seems like a good idea, but whether or not it can be effectively implemented remains to be seen. And that’s without even mentioning the privacy concerns.
I’m interested to see how it goes.
Great question. But I thnk the reality is that the semantic web is going to continue to evolve from meta data tagging to full contextualized processes that drill way deeper into patterns and logic. Maybe articficial intelligence?? Here is a guy who sorts some of it out….Semantic web patterns