Semantic Web: Making sense and cents of the web

Semantic Web: Making sense and cents of the web

It should be noted that matching advertisements to web pages and, indirectly with the interests of the reader, is an exercise in semantics. The broker's system tries to distill the essence of the meaning of a web page with some keywords. The advertising system, as an e-commerce process, depends on the correctness of the matching. Readers will not respond to advertisements unrelated to their interests and advertisers will not pay the broker for no clicks. As web pages gain more machine readable meaning, via approaches such as the Semantic Web, this process can be refined and further automated.

The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which integrates a variety of applications using XML for syntax and URIs for naming.

"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." -- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001

From: Semantic Web, W3C, 2005, URL: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

Small web publishers, such as the author, are likely to be entering content and laying it out manually. The advertising broker needs to provide a web based interface for the advertiser and the publishers to create their advertisements and place them. Large web sites may have data entered and positioned automatically and may be dynamically created from a database. These require the creation and placement to be more automated and can use Web Services.