There is a story is the New York Times titled, Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. The article starts with this:
From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.
Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century. Article continued here.
You beat to posting this…
…but no matter. Great article here although I don’t quite agree with calling it Web 3.0. The basics of the Semantic Web “movement” can be found at the W3C’s Semantic Web Activity site. Background info about ontologies can be found at a now-defunct site called WonderWeb.
The NYT article mentions NSA, CIA, and DARPA as instigators of some of the early research into the semantic web. It might surprise some to know that CIA, at least, has also adopted wiki-based technology in order to share info internally. (Just when you thought government organizations were staid and stodgy… 🙂 )
Another organization actively researching applications for the semantic web is the Knowledge Management Working Group of the Federal CIO Council. Collectively, KM.Gov.
As cools as all of this artifical intelligence is, does anyone else get the heebie-jeebies when they think about “Terminator?” –Durst