This is a quick introduction to the semantic web. Over the next couple of minutes, I'll outline one of the toughest problems a web is facing today. I'll also explain what's being done about it and how it's going to affect you. You don't need to be a web developer or blogger to understand any of the concepts in this short intro. If you can open a web browser, then you can understand the semantic web. So before going any further, it's important to know what the word semantics actually means. Semantics is related to syntax. In most languages, syntax is how you say something, whereas semantics is the meaning behind what you said. Let's take the phrase, I love technology as an example. The syntax is all of the letters, words, and punctuation in the sentence. The semantics is what the sentence actually means. In this case, it means that you enjoy learning about and using new technology. Now, if we were to change the sentence using a different symbol for the word love, we have changed the syntax of the sentence. However, note that the semantics of the sentence is still the same. When you write I-Hart technology, it still means that you enjoy learning about and using new technology. When we talk about syntax and semantics, what we're really talking about is communication. When you want to communicate with somebody else, you use your voice to do so. The internet created a standard way for computers to communicate with one another. In other words, it gave a voice to computers so that they may talk to each other and exchange information. However, much like a parrot can mimic human sounds without understanding them, computers merely mimic human information to one another. So while the internet enables computers to talk to one another, it was not designed to teach them what the information actually means. When the web came along, it created a very quick and easy way for us to retrieve and view information. You can think of the web as a huge document storage and retrieval system. When you put a website address into your browser, it sends a request to the website. The request basically states that you would like the document located at the address that you gave it. The website retrieves a document and sends it back to your web browser. This document is written in a language called HTML. The HTML language defines a syntax that computers can understand. It tells a computer how to display the document to you. So the two really neat things that the web did is create a way to get any document on the internet, and it also created a syntax called HTML that is used to display the document for you. So what's the big deal? We have the internet that lets us talk to each other. We have the web that lets us store and retrieve any document on the internet, and we have search engines which can find just about any website that we'd want. The web is already pretty good, so how are we going to make it any better? The answer lies in semantics. Remember computers today just blindly retrieve and show us information. That's the problem. Computers don't understand the meaning behind the web pages that they're showing us. While they may understand the syntax, the semantics are lost on them. Now if we could get computers to recognize what's in a web page, they could learn what we're interested in. If they know that, then they can help us get what we want. They would change from passively helping us to actively helping us. This is really what the semantic web is all about. It helps computers understand the meaning behind a web page. The web of today is about documents, whereas the semantic web is about things. When I say things, I mean anything. People, places, events, music, movies, organizations, and just about any concept that you can think of. The semantic web is not only about pointing these things out to a computer, but also about letting computers know how these things are related to each other. There are several promising technologies that are in use today that can embed semantics in HTML documents. Two of the more popular ways are called Microformats and RDFA. So the semantic web stuff isn't about something that is going to happen in the future. It's about something that is happening today. Things get really exciting when we start to explore the possibilities of the semantic web. Once your computer can understand what a person a place and an event is, it can start helping you interact with those things. For example, if a birthday party is marked up as an event with a date and a place, you can tell your computer to save the date in your calendar. Another example is in the world of music blogs. Music blogs usually list songs and album reviews on their front page. If the blog marked up the songs and the artists using semantic technology, you could tell your browser to find all of the songs on the page or search the internet for other albums by the same artist. Search engines would also become a great deal more accurate than they are today. When you search, you could say that you are searching for a person, a place, or a particular song. A search engine could then refer you to a website with far more accuracy because it wouldn't have to just depend on keywords in web pages anymore. It could also depend on the semantics in that web page. So the semantic web holds a great deal of promise in making our lives easier by helping computers help us get what we want. If you'd like to find out more about the semantic web, there are a couple of websites that are good starting points. If you'd like to know what all of this looks like in a web browser, check out the operator plugin for the Firefox web browser. There is also a group of people on the web called the Microformats community that are working on spreading the idea of the semantic web. Last but not least, the semantic web is also a major focus of the worldwide web consortium. They are the people that are working on HTML and RDFA and many of the other technologies that power the semantic web today and in the future. This entire video and all of the source material used to make it is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-like license. That means that you can remix and distribute copies of this video over the web or via any peer-to-peer network. I hope that you've learned a bit more about web semantics and why it's an important part of the web's future. If you found this introduction helpful, please share it with your friends.