The Semantic Web: Relationships And Information Filtering

NYU journalism and psychology student Kate Ray recently created Web 3.0, a short documentary on the Semantic Web, which includes some interesting interviews and insights.

The documentary addresses challenges presented by the vast amount of information we now have at our fingertips via the Internet, and how we might find ways to make sense of it. The Semantic Web, some argue, is the answer to our filtering woes. Essentially, the Semantic Web adds extra information to existing information to assist with meaning.

Says interviewee John Hebeler:

It’s all about relationships, it’s about relationships of one string to another string, or one number to another number…And if I have enough of those relationships, I can start to build context, and context is what it’s all about…If I said any kind of word, it’s the context that surrounds the word that really gave you the meaning. What your brain has really done is connected that one word with all kinds of relationships. In a technical sense, all the Semantic Web does is start to give all these relationships.

Ray covers disagreements amongst Semantic Web visionaries as to how things are to work exactly and also explores the future of the concept. Overall, the documentary provides a smart, visually concise, and easily digestible look into the evolution of something that has fundamentally changed our lives.

[The transcript]
[The film: Web 3.0]