A Super-Fast Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) was announced on 27APR2007 by Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway. A detailed description of the SWSE can be found here.

I guess you have to visualize how this is important in your own context. Enabling your real estate business to describe itself as services offered, subject matter experts across your professional staff, property listings, to name just a few entities that can exist in the virtual semantic web data space. Most Web sites have uncharacterized content that is difficult or impossible to extract meaning from it. Such search engines are going to be able to return answers to questions queried instead of links, in mere fractions of a second. This is why it is a break through.

It is not so important whether you understand the technical detailed description of the SWSE. It is important however to start considering and planning to put your information into the RDF format. Very soon it may be more important than making Search Engine Optimization (SEO) investments. You can get to know the Semantic Web better by browsing my blog postings from the bottom up as I try to introduce it in smaller digestible chunks and how it has the potential to improve your business.

In my Semantic Web Browser Overview post I wanted to give folks an idea of what is the difference between Web Browsers vs. Semantic Web Browsers and also to distinguish some differences between the two classes of Semantic Browsers.

Semantic Web Browsers have been around for sometime now. They have made there way from the research labs to main stream. Most people do not know about these because there are no corporate power house marketing departments spreading the word. I like that just fine because when I find these gems it gives me a competitive leg up.

HP Labs Semantic Web Research came out with BrownSauce RDF Browser an early rather Plain Jane piece of software design to only surf documents, not distributed semantic data across the Web. For some screenshots click here. You probably would not bother with this browser but it only serves to show you that these applications have been in development for a long time.
In up coming posts I am going to introduce you to some new Semantic Web Browsers that are consumer grade. In the overview post I mentioned the Longwell Semantic Web Browser and I have demonstrated it with short samples of Property Banks in some of my other postings and comments. Longwell requires no installation as it is working for you from my server. All that is required is for you to make sure you are using the Firefox Browser.

Now the Cats-Meow to Longwell is called Piggy Bank. Piggy Bank requires that you install it as an extension to Firefox. It is EASY!

The HayStack Semantic Web Browser is a neat design because its design basis is for the Intelligent Handling and Management of Information no matter whether it is RDF E-Mail or IM text messaging etc.

Why am I selling the Semantic Web? I guess because the concepts are more concrete. I do not have to take all the optimization sales pitches at face value and cross my fingers they are going to work. And, I am here to say to you that transitioning to the next version of the Web should not scare you away because it is too technical. You do not need to revamp your web sites, re-engineer them or start over. There are many simple transparent things you can do to add this super-charging capability.

In many cases, using RDF-based techniques makes the mashing up process easier, mainly when data collected by one application is reused by another one somewhere down the line. The general nature of RDF makes this “mashup chaining” straightforward, which is not always the case for simpler Web 2.0 applications.

I am just giving you some guidance on the tools you need and the confidence. I can not expect people to adopt Property Banks if they do not have a great Semantic Web Browser. You should not care how the Property Bank is constructed using RDF, all you care about is that the browser is easy to use and gives you what you and your customers want.

John Wubbel

PropertyClubPro.com

jwubbel@propertyclubpro.com