(1888PressRelease)
April 22, 2009 - April 2009 is witness to the launch of a brand new form of feed directory – RSS 001, a feed directory that uses semantic data.
The semantic web has been called many things, including Web 3.0 and the Giant Global Graph.
Simply explained, today's World Wide Web is built for humans to read and semantic web developers are working towards a global system which is also more machine readable, and which, in turn, will allow humans to reorganise and use online information available far more effectively.
There are a number of different semantic search engines in existence today, and the father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been working with the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since the late 90s.
Because of the theoretical and technological challenges of the endeavour progress has been slow, although many involved are hoping that the next decade will usher in the Web 3.0 era, as the 90s carried the first incarnation of the web and this decade was synonymous with Web 2.0.
RSS 001 was built on the Drupal CMS platform and uses the Calais system for sharing data.
Web designer and creator of RSS 001, Andy Walpole, said about its creation:
“Semantic technology is very much in alpha phase at the moment. It exists, but is very experimental and has few practical uses.
“Elements of it though, like RDF and microformats, have found popular use and will no doubt continue, and RDF formats are used in RSS 001.
“Microformats, an element of the semantic web, have been playing useful roles for some years now – particularly Hcard and Hcalender; and these will certainly continue to expand; but the sheer complexities of a semantic web mean that although much is on the drawing board, little has filtered out into practical use.
“The greatest advantage of Calais is that provides an easy-to-use functioning system, and although only launched in 2008 already processes more than 1 million documents per day.
“Hopefully, RSS 001 can be a contribution to this new and exciting phase of the web.”
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