We have spent much of our time in class discussing how the web is an information network. An evolving extension of the world wide web exists called the semantic web, originally conceived by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Tim Berners-Lee. Just like the web, the semantic web is an information network. Unlike the regular web though, the semantic web aims to allow computers to perform similar operations that humans do regularly. Actions such as buying items off eBay, or checking out books from a library currently requires human interaction to be achieved. The semantic web aims to allow a computer to perform similar operations without the need for human direction.

 Anyone familiar with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language used primarily to write web pages, knows that webpages frequently have meta tags at the beginning of the document to specify to the computer the content of the web page. The semantic web takes this idea a step further by publishing data in a Resource Description Format (RDF) that allows computers to understand the web page in similar terms to human perception. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is primarily used to implement this data format on the semantic web.

 In his article Semantic Networks and Social Networks Stephen Downes makes the argument that the information used to represent people or information in RDF should include the use of social network analysis, represented as social meta-data, in order to increase the accuracy of semantic web searches. So if you could represent a person’s social behavior and attributes on the web as data, this information, used in conjunction with the semantic web can result in web searches that will return what the user is most likely looking for. In essence we are searching for a resource based on the contents of the resource and the social properties of the author. Of course the key here is to define the identity of the author and user in such a way that reflects the web content that is related to them. With properly defined identities I could theoretically run a search on articles on a certain subject (say video gaming) authored by people who are similar to me.

 As is easily seen the above discussion is simply a combination of the social networking we see on sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Match.com applied to web searching.

 Source: http://www.downes.ca/post/31624