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Swoogle

A very interesting phenomena is Swoogle, a sort of Google for the Semantic Web

There is also an interesting comment on the Swoogle Blog, probably belonging more properly to previous section.

One vision that many of us have is that the Web is evolving into a collective brain for human society, complete with long term memory (web pages), active behaviors (web services and agents), a stream of consciousness (the Blogosphere) and a nervous system (Internet protocols).

SHOE

An ambitious example from several years ago ( from before the time of the W3 Semantic Web project and no longer maintained ) is SHOE, which may still have a few lessons for the SW five years later.

SHOE is a small extension to HTML which allows web page authors to annotate their web documents with machine-readable knowledge. SHOE makes real intelligent agent software on the web possible.

HTML was never meant for computer consumption; its function is for displaying data for humans to read. The "knowledge" on a web page is in a human-readable language (usually English), laid out with tables and graphics and frames in ways that we as humans comprehend visually.

Unfortunately, intelligent agents aren't human. Even with state-of-the-art natural language technology, getting a computer to read and understand web documents is very difficult. This makes it very difficult to create an intelligent agent that can wander the web on its own, reading and comprehending web pages as it goes.

SHOE eliminates this problem by making it possible for web pages to include knowledge that intelligent agents can actually read.

This is an very straightforward and concise description of the need for applying Semantic Web technology to the difficulties of processing HTML, for both people and computers.