Essential Web 07: Paul Walsh on Segala and semantic web

Paul Walsh started his career in 1995 at what was then a small startup called AOL. Subsequently, Paul went on to start Segala – a Dublin based company helping organisations to ensure their Web sites are accessible to as many potential users across as many devices as possible. Behind this simple aspiration, however, lies a very powerful idea – semantic web. What Segala is offering today is not the full semantic web but a small implementation (a firefox plugin that annotates search engine results) that is starting to move in that direction. Every time you search for something online, the browser extension offers you additional information (metadata) about each search result. This data might help you to understand if a website is accessible to visually impaired users, whether it is accredited by an independent review body (e.g. is this medical site trustworthy?) or whether a site is child friendly. Segala’s metadata, also known as a content label is based on the W3C Semantic Web method known as Resource Description Framework (RDF), which is the foundation of the semantic web. According to Paul Walsh, Tom Raftery called the semantic web the “plumbing of the internet” – a bit like web 2.0 but more focused on the underlying data rather than its presentation. Web 3.0 anyone?

Channel: intruders.tv Video Length: 0s Date Found: Fri, Dec 04 2009 3:35 AM Category: Technology Date Produced: View Count: 9