The Semantic Web: Just beginning

"Simon Fraser University is located in Burnaby, BC." You have no problem reading this sentence. You understand that Simon Fraser University is an university name, which is an institution of higher education. You know Burnaby is a name of a place; Burnaby is in BC. You made all of the sense instantly by reading that sentence. But a computer has no idea what all means. Computers don't know what Simon Fraser University is, or even what a university is. It is a collection of characters; it is a string, but nothing else unless you tell them the meaning.

The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to "understand" and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.

Semantic Web - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

People can read web pages and understand the meaning of those, but computers can't. So the Semantic Web is trying to read the web pages and extract the meaning from it.
If computers can understand the Web and "read" web pages, it can give us more meaningful information.

If you are interested in the Semantic Web, this article does a really good job on describing what the Semantic Web is all about and how it works.
and here is my bookmark on the Semantic Web: http://www.diigo.com/user/naoyamakino/semanticWeb?tab=250
Kevin Kelly's talk at TED describes only few possibilities of what the Semantic Web could do.

This is pretty cool, and I am looking into that more.