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« Negroponte: Rich countries to buy laptops for poor — When road tax, red diesel, organic food and bio-fuels meet, Part 3 »
Tech’ news in brief: MIT awarded $1.5m to research search technologies
Thursday, 14 December 2006 — by Wayne Smallman
Search technologies are still a scholastic concern:
“MIT recently received a $1,500,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the next phase of a project that promises to create new search technologies for digital libraries.The project, called SIMILE, brings together researchers from the MIT Libraries Digital Library Research Group (DLRG) and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) to create next-generation search technology using Semantic Web standards—a group of standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium to promote large-scale interoperability and reusability of content on the Web.”
What’s interesting here is: “… next-generation search technology using Semantic Web standards” which sort of leaped out at me.
“Semantic Web technologies offer a way to make searching and navigating large digital libraries easier.”
Semantic Web technologies will help with just about anything you throw on the web. Problem is, we’re not ready yet!
When you hear people talking up the Semantic Web, you often hear them do so with some kind of hushed reverence.
I remember this when I attended a technology event in Sheffield, England some two years ago. There was plenty of talk about the Semantic Web, but it’s a dialogue as couched in cryptic fable as any religious study, as if the Semantic Web is the promised land.
Maybe it is, the Semantic Web certainly does propose neat answers to a lot of the leading problems with the current web, such as relevance, specificity and the ability of web applications to talk more seamlessly with each other.
I looked around – but not too hard – and I couldn’t find anything that looked like a roll-out date for anything like an end product.
Still, this is MIT after all, anything like an end product could be years in the making.
But probably well worth the wait…
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