The Future Is All About Context: The Pragmatic Web

Description

The semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation.

However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized.

This guest post was written by Alisa Leonard-Hansen.

Rather, meaningful and relevant experiences now are born out of the context of our identities and social graph: the pragmatics, or contextual meaning, of our online identities. My Web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant to me when it is layered with contextual social data based on my identity. This is the pragmatic Web.

We need to better understand our identity as it begins to define our experience of the Web and the networked-enabled world we inhabit. Our online identity will increasingly be defined by three "pillars": who I say I am, what I do and say, and who I connect to (and who connects to me).

To clarify, our online identities ...

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_all_about_context_the_pragmatic_web.php#more