Legal Research

The Semantic Web

By Evan VanDyk

Some time ago in his column, Joel Alleyne wrote about Law and the Semantic Web. He borrowed a definition of the semantic web that described it as ?? an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily?.

For those of us just getting up to speed on the potential of this way of organizing and discovering the internet, here is a great resource. This article outlines 10 new sites and companies that are putting the power of this technology to work.

Off the top of my head, we’ve only seen one of them (Powerset) mentioned at slaw before. There are a number of other quite interesting suggestions, though. The next time I travel, I plan to give TripIt a try. And the comments are full of other links and sites. It’s well worth a quick look to get a feeling for the power of this new technology.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 03, 2008 (boomark / email).