Sunday, January 11, 2009

Google exposing location-based semantic data in search results?


This ReadWriteWeb article caught our attention last week. Marshall indicates that Google searches are now being "responded to with explicitly semantic structured information."

For example, The response to the search, "capital city of Virginia" is now displayed above regular search results structured in the subject-predicate-object form, or triples, of Semantic Web. Marshall goes on to indicate that "the answers aren't found structured that way on the web pages they come from - Google appears to be parsing the semantic structure from semi or unstructured data."

Why is this important? Because it adds meaning to information - more specifically it adds machine-processable meaning to information. So using location information and the form -
Virginia-Capital: Richmond

- seems to indicate that basic semantic processing has been done to structure the subject (Virginia), the characteristic of the subject that the statement specifies (Capital) called the predicate, and the part that identifies the value of that characteristic, called the object (Richmond). With this type of progress smart Web Feature Services (WFS) and geospatial ontologies can't be far behind (?)

- Jeff


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