Ever since I was introduced to the Semantic Web back in 2000, the idea was to help computers better understand connections and relationships between objects and data that were being presented on the Web.  The vision is to put data in context, relate it and organize it in ways that only humans can currently do, so computers can then inter-relate information from multiple sites and perform more useful functions in an automatic way.

In a world where all pages are semantically marked, if one website indicates that George Harrison is a member of the Beatles, and another quotes George Harrison mentioning that he learned to play sitar with Ravi Shankar, while yet another annotates the musical scales of Mr. Shankar and those used in Sgt. Pepper, then a semantic search engine might relate the music to the time, place, and style and even play passages from various related songs available for sale on the site.

Likewise, another semantic-search might map out crime data for a neighborhood and show that houses with a particular security system are safer (and for sale on the site). A semantic-based travel site might give you a budgeted and targeted range of options for a $3,000 vacation in Hawaii based on your favorite things to do as you expressed in your newsfeed on Facebook, and from data from various travel sites.

In the medium-term, some of the examples of the changes to come are in what I call product companioning sites.  These sites add value to a customers shopping experience by suggesting items that could be part of a set.  One such companioning site is Polyvore.com.  Polyvore provides users with the tools to generate clothing outfits from a range of retailers and share the ideas on a single site.  These new and innovative affiliate marketing sites give a huge amount of creative control to their community, create strong relationships with that community and sell product.

More structured, semantically-tagged data will enable even more new and innovative applications. So e-commerce sites that tag products semantically can benefit as new sites as innovative as Polyvore begin to emerge.

For ~ Vaga by ~Adorable~T “Birthday Dec 21″ featuring Ted Baker

That’s the medium term. In the short term, semantic tagging will pay off to retailers as major search engines channel more volume.  As more and more search engines  use semantic data to create more valuable search results, it will become a race for retail sites to boost their page rank and organic search click-through rate.

Written with Chris Bierbower

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