Uploaded December 2016 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Today web content exists largely for human consumption, and as a result in a semi-structured form. Tomorrow, we may see the emergence of even more structured web content that makes the web easier for machines to understand and more like a distributed database. Take, for example, the sentence: "Geoffrey Challen started working at UB in 2011." To a human, this sentence represents a relationship between two entities (Geoffrey Challen and UB) and a fact about that relationship (started in 2011). However, a computer might find this description hard to parse without sophisticated natural language processing. In the future, next-generation semantic web technologies may help structure this relationship more clearly using additional markup.
Credits: Talking: Geoffrey Challen (Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo). Producing: Greg Bunyea (Undergraduate, Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo).
Part of the internet-class.org online internet course. A blue Systems Research Group (https://www.bluegroup.systems) production.
Today web content exists largely for human consumption, and as a result in a semi-structured form. Tomorrow, we may see the emergence of even more structured web content that makes the web easier for machines to understand and more like a distributed database. Take, for example, the sentence: "Geoffrey Challen started working at UB in 2011." To a human, this sentence represents a relationship between two entities (Geoffrey Challen and UB) and a fact about that relationship (started in 2011). However, a computer might find this description hard to parse without sophisticated natural language processing. In the future, next-generation semantic web technologies may help structure this relationship more clearly using additional markup.
Credits: Talking: Geoffrey Challen (Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo). Producing: Greg Bunyea (Undergraduate, Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo).
Part of the internet-class.org online internet course. A blue Systems Research Group (https://www.bluegroup.systems) production.
