There has been a big buzz about Stephen Wolfram’s new upcoming semantic based search engine, WolframAlpha. There’s been talk, again, that finally a Google killer is in the horizon. The future will tell if it is going to kill Google or not; however, it does bring to the spotlight a very important concept, the concept of semantic web.

Semantic web is a concept put forward by Tim Berners-Lee. It refers to the information on the web with meaning. In other words, in semantic web all of the information will have meaning attached to it. Implication of this new web would be first retrieval of exact information, and second the ability to act on it.

Siri

In fact, Siri inc is working on a software just like that. Dag Kittlaus cofounder of Siri Inc, in his interview with TechnologyReview.com said that in 5 to 10 years everybody will have a personal assistance who will be able schedule things, make actual restaurant reservations and much more.

This device can only work if it understands the meaning of data. If does not know how to parse a query  such as “reserve a good sea food restaurant” then, of course, it won’t be able to act on it.

To understand what a user wants is the first step, the next and most important step is how to find the data to act on -in this case  it needs to find the best sea food restaurant to reserve.

Of course, services like Yelp or Google locals can give us good information about certain queries for restaurants, but how good are they in understanding true meaning of a user query -not that good, try searching for “good sea food restaurant” in Google.

Wolfram Alpha

From early descriptions of WolframAlpha it seems that it might understand the relationship and meaning of words better. Perhaps, it would provide us with a good semantic search system. If it does then Siric Inc’s device can use it to create better virtual assistant.

Regardless, situation can be improved once we have true semantic search. When we have that, the virtual assistant can certainly work very well, and we might indeed have a virtual assistant that can do some of our tasks.

Semantic web provides potentials that perhaps we never dreamt of. I am happy to see this concept becoming main-stream.

An introduction to Semantic Web:

Watch the Inventor of WWW talk about  semantic web: