Data Mapping

As web technologies evolve, many leading analysts are looking beyond “Web 2.0” and asking “what’s next?” If Tim Berners-Lee is to be believed, the web will evolve according to semantic relationships, which will provide for near universal data-sharing across various applications and sites, breaking down the previous-generation “walled garden” model that is commonly associated with today’s proprietary data standards.

Berners-Lee has a reputation for foresight in terms of shaping the web’s direction, as he is credited with establishing the hyper-text protocol (HTTP) which powers the web while working as a researcher at Cern. As a leading technologist, Berners-Lee works for the Web Consortium (W3C) as well as serving on boards at 3Com and MIT. As a researcher working out of the University of Southampton, he is working with a variety of collaborators on the next set of web standards. In order to better understand the future direction of semantic search, it’s important to understand how the major players in search have evolved, as well as their potential innovations.

Shortly after the development of the first web-standards, the first-generation of web search utilized a series of algorithms based entirely on text, led by companies such as Lycos and Excite. Without a clear leader, Google emerged as a startup in 1998 which improved upon web-results by integrating their Page-Rank algorithm to associate rankings based upon links between sites, a product of research from the company’s founders at Stanford University. Today, the major players in the space, Google, Ask, Microsoft and Yahoo, are also competing with a variety of startups, including Powerset and Wikia, which aim to improve the indexing standards by incorporating broader sets of data into their ranking algorithms. In this context, search is evolving to become closer to the “intelligent agents…capable of analyzing all the data on the Web…” as envisioned by Berners-Lee. As search engines move beyond text to capture universal search (rich media, social graphics and maps), a number of new initiatives are competing to create the next generation of search with the goal of truly answering search queries by improving the relevance of results.

XML, or Extensible Markup Language, forms the basis for a variety of data-sharing formats, which are common across a variety of applications, including web-based feeds (RSS) as well as vector graphics and application-specific uses. Designed by the W3 Consortium, XML is considered the standard language for a wide variety of modern web applications. The language developed as an evolution of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup), and gained wide-spread application after its adoption by W3 in 1998.

In many web applications, raw XML code can be displayed in a stylized format by referencing a CSS style-sheet. For example, a reference would be in the form where CSS.css refers to the style-sheet relative to a specific display function. For users who aggregate data cross the web, such as e-Commerce companies (who aggregate pricing, shopping and coupon information), as well as news and media organizations (who provide real-time feeds), XML is a way to facilitate data sharing across a virtually unlimited set of partners; each end-user can display (format) the data in the context of their individual site design.

While aggregation of public data is one application of XML, many companies use the language to distribute private data across intranets. For this purpose, the data may be encrypted so that it can only be read by users who have a data key. The standard format of encryption is known as XML-Enc, which helps safeguard data such as XBRL (Business Reporting) financial data; XBRL is commonly used to transmit banking data. As XML has gained widespread adoption, including becoming an ISO standard, it continues to develop and evolve along with improvements in end-user applications.