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Technology

Google, Twitter and Facebook build the semantic web

By Jim Giles

28 July 2010

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A TRULY meaningful way of interacting with the web may finally be here, and it is called the semantic web. The idea was proposed over a decade ago by Tim Berners-Lee, among others. Now a triumvirate of internet heavyweights – Google, Twitter and Facebook – are making it real.

The defining characteristic of the semantic web is that information should be stored in a machine-readable format. Crucially, that would allow computers to handle information in ways we would find more useful, because they would be processing the concepts…

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