As the World Wide Web grows, a meeting this week in Edinburgh, Scotland is aimed at creating a "semantic Web," which would enable better labeling, interpretation, and linking of information on the Internet. Macworld UKis Jeremy Kirk quoted Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web in 1989 and is an attendee at the conference, as saying: "I think thereis a chance actually that we can do better this time around."
He added: "I think itis also possible we mess that up, and the Web 2.0 becomes a big mess of rather unreliable stuff which you end up having to go through with Google."
"Computer scientists have grand visions for how the semantic web will help users cut to the core information they are seeking," Mr. Kirk reported. "A few years ago, attaching keywords to web pages was seen as the way to make orderly sense of data, but that is now increasingly viewed as inferior."
Of course, organizing information on the Internet is how search engines make their money, as Mr. Berners-Lee pointed out. "If you gave them order, then they wouldnit have a business," he said. "So thatis why they are not interested in looking at the semantic web."