Dries Buytaert

What does the semantic web offer my site? This is a question I hear all to often. Much of the talk about the semantic web, one of the new hot buzz words, deals with its integration into popular tools such as drupal or the power it will provide when every one's doing it. As someone building sites for clients before the semantic web is in the mainstream it can be easy to dismiss the technology for the time being. Let's look into why it's good to embrace the semantic web now in some practical ways.

What The Semantic Web Means To Your Site Now

Metadata is a something that's been around for a long time. It's in our Microsoft word documents, we often store it in XML, and it helps us better describe what ever it is we are working on. What if your metadata and the metadata of others could work for you?

Imagine someone is viewing a piece of content on your site and you have related content based on the keywords used in the content but, you didn't have to fill in the keywords. They were provided by a smart engine that reads you text and finds them. Or, you have some content about a company and information about that company is displayed in a sidebar automatically based on information from other services. This is what we can do with the semantic web today.

On the flip side, when we have content about sites, companies, services, or other things we want to share them with others. Embracing the semantic web allows use to do that in a way that machines can read, something many websites struggle with. Remember that Google, Yahoo, and search engines are machines trying to read our sites.