Nowadays, the World Wide Web becomes much more dominant from the one in five years ago since it allows individual to be a publisher and express his or her own idea. Before this era, the WWW used to belong to large organizations or companies as well as its contents are very limited to texts and images. Then, the growing of internet technology, especially the uploading bandwidth, lets everyone easier publish their stories, images, or even videos to the world, as we can see from the exponential growth of many web sites namely MySpace.com, Youtube.com, or Flickr.com. However, from many experts’ view, we only utilize about 25% of its power.

The Semantic Web is intended to be the future of the WWW in order to utilize its all potential. This concept was initiated by Tim Berners-Lee – the investor of the World Wide Web – and others. In their vision, the characteristic of today WWW contains one major problem which is WWW is designed for human to read. At the first glance, the previous statement should not be a problem since WWW is obviously designed for human. However, when the WWW is growing to tremendous size, it is tough for us as a human to read all information in the Internet. We therefore need the help of computer to read that information and retrieve only handful interesting ones for us. Thus, the WWW should not be readable only by human but also by computer software. Web sites will then become tremendous valuable resources that we can write infinite software utilizing them.

For example, if I would like to make an appointment with a physician, I can search his information on the Internet, call his front desk, and ask for available times. What if his available times are not match with mine? Then, I have to repeat this tedious process again with a new physician. In the future, with The Semantic Web, however, each physician will have his/her own identity in the WWW. Then, I can use software (called Agent) to search for information (since this information is in machine-readable format). The Agent also know my schedule and then can find the best match as well as make an appointment for me. This example is a very simple application which we will gain from The Semantic Web.
The WWW is a very young technology and it needs us to shape its future. Presently, there is no one know what it will become in the future. But, a lot of people, especially researchers, try to gradually develop it to benefit humanity most. What do you think about the WWW in the future? Which feature of it will benefit you most?