Semantic Web make changes on Yahoo!

Semantic Web is "an extension of the current web (WWW) in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers, and people to work in co-operation" (Berners-Lee et al. 2001).

You could be asking: Why is there an emergence of Semantic Web?
The reason is basically to solve limitations of today's web such as results are single web pages, the web activities are mostly focus on Machine-to-Human, and Machine-to-Machine activities are not particularly well supported by software tools.

Therefore, Semantic Web is trying to develop a concept in the opposite way of the Syntactic Web whereby

• Computers do the linking and interpreting, and

• People do the presentations conveniently.

For example, in Syntactic web, if you would like to search for information, you would type the keyword(s) in the search engine and the results will be displayed in one page based on the keyword(s). However, with Semantic Web, the results will be precisely displayed in more details such as in the image below. Thus it can avoid insufficient information, save time, and easier.

Source: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/semantic-web1.htm

The latest report on March 14th 2008 in by BBC News,

• Yahoo! is attracted by the emergence of the Semantic Web as "they would start to include some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for Yahoo! search" to win a big audience.

• According to Professor Stefan Decker, a director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at the National University of Ireland, it would help Yahoo! to make a search more productive with the advent of Semantic Web as it promise to produce sufficient and precise results in details.

• Professor Wendy Hall from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and a director of the Web Research Science Initiative, claimed that "the move to the semantic web could pose challenges for established companies such as Google which have grown on the back of indexing documents rather than objects".

• Yahoo! believed that it could help them compete with Google by adapting Semantic Web.

To conclude, I would say that it will it will be beneficial for Semantic Web users and future generation as it will produce well-defined meaning, better collaboration of computer and people in productivity and effectiveness, and reduce the burden of obtaining precise information in a short period of time.