Semantic technology has come a long way, baby. This is illustrated in the recent announcement that Siri’s creators had successfully placed an order for pizza with voice commands. IT ProPortal brought this news to us in their article, “Metadata: How businesses can use it to its fullest.”
Granted, pizza alone is worth a celebration, but in this case the Semantic Web – the vision of computers intelligently communicating with each other to automate complicated tasks deserves the credit.
Much of the promise of the Semantic Web is built on a platform of metadata, which is used to identify data in a machine-readable fashion. For example, metadata can be used to differentiate between types of doctors so that someone asking their digital assistant for a nearby doctor isn’t directed to a doctor of veterinary medicine.
Metadata can be useful wherever machine intelligence is required, including in an organization’s business-critical content. There are challenges that come with the use of metadata as well as benefits. Staff productivity goes up with experts able to focus elsewhere and it can also take the ability to make mistakes within data linking out of human hands, subsequently improving the quality of metadata for business and customer use.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
