Challenges and Opportunities Existing for Semantic Web

The semantic web is an evolving concept associated with web 3.0. The term is introduced by World Wide Web and its main purpose is to make information better to be accessed as well as usable for its communities.

The concept is becoming a buzzword on the Internet which gives users the facility to get not just the information they searched for, but the information they really wanted to gain knowledge about. Any information that is directly connected to the context, and not just the keyword.

The semantic web has garnered a lot of attention from various developers, researchers, and organizations. This main discovery of the web makes use of contextual signals to discern what we actually wanted to look for on the basis of what we type on the Google search box. However, at the one side, it offers advantages to the webmasters as well as to its users, on the other side, there are significant challenges that the semantic web deals with. As social computing is still under development, and thus making it capable to deal with a huge content is a major problem.

In this post, we will analyze the pros and cons associated with the implementation of semantic and what can be done to manage it effectively.

1. Semantic Web: Pros

The semantic web is a testimony of the transition that we see in today's Internet world. A world where we search and find information that we actually need. It is more transparent and open and it's continuously becoming a hub where the same content can be presented in different ways for different individuals. For example, a search for “burgers” at morning time say around 10 am would generate informational links and recipes for making burgers, but if a same search is carried around 8pm at night, it would provide links for restaurants making burgers.

Google with the help of semantic web not only just look at the keywords typed in the search box but also who is asking the information and in what context. This way, the information is filtered accurately and the searcher will get the answers in the best possible manner. It sounds like quite interesting to make it possible for a machine to “understand” what the data means.

Another advantage of the semantic web is that it provides an entirely new approach for marketers to market their products and services efficiently. It improves the content interactivity and makes the information usable to the customers. On the semantic web, it is easier to extract the meaning of the data. It helps marketers to understand the customer behavior and how it can lead the future.

2. Semantic Web: Cons

Despite of so many opportunities, there are some challenges exist in the implementation of semantic web. There is still a large number of business owners who are not aware of this concept, which makes them add metadata manually into Ontology Web Language semantic markups, which is quite daunting.

Another problem that online players feel about using Semantic web is the increased invasion of privacy. As it makes the information accessible to everyone, there is an increased risk of abuse of information and unwanted personalization. For example: contextual ads that are used to evaluate the website content may be replaced with ads that target specific users and their interest such as lifestyle, friends, behavior, income etc.

Vocabulary incompatibilities is yet another issue that makes semantic web not a relevant choice to a certain extent. Since, the vocabularies apply meaning to a content and classify it, the problem is when two individuals are adding different vocabularies to the same terms describing different meanings, it kills the actual meaning intended by the author. This reflects the need for an open vocabulary in the semantic web.

As the Internet is growing by every leap and bounds, and this growth is cultivating an entirely new kind of web called semantic web. It's a no secret that businesses need to leverage the benefits provided by semantic search that not only provide the most relevant results, but also metadata that informs about the intent. Although, the semantic web has its own downsides and still there are miles to go to make it a flawless system, but it can still be viewed as a new vision of the future web to present the information in its most needed forms.