Capitalising on richer Web data

A quiet revolution is coming our way. Recent successful trials of European semantic-Web applications suggest that machine-readable data will soon usher in an improved Web that will facilitate information reuse, and provide for painless building and maintenance of community portals.
"Computers struggle to attach meaning to information written in common Web languages such as Hypertext Markup Language [HTML]," says Libby Miller, coordinator of the IST SWAD-Europe project. "One way to help computers is to add tags, in a language that looks a bit like HTML but is actually new. The result of these information tags is rich data, allowing people and computers to work better together."