Excellent article on semantic tech and its future

excerpt and url below:-

What is the Semantic Wave?

The semantic wave is a tidal wave of four stages of internet growth. The first stage, Web 1.0, was about connecting information and getting on the net. Web 2.0 is about connecting people — putting the “I” in user interface, and the “we” into Webs of social participation. The next stage, Web 3.0, is starting now. It is about representing meanings, connecting knowledge, and putting these to work in ways that make our experience of internet more relevant, useful, and enjoyable. Web 4.0 will come later. It is about connecting intelligences in a ubiquitous Web where both people and things reason and communicate together.

Over the next decade, the semantic wave will spawn multi-billion dollar technology markets that will drive trillion dollar global economic expansions to transform
industries as well as our experience of the internet. The Semantic Wave 2008 report examines drivers and market forces for adoption of semantic technologies in Web 3.0 and maps opportunities for investors, technology developers, and public and private enterprises.

What are Semantic Technologies?

Semantic technologies are digital tools that represent meanings and knowledge (e.g., knowledge of something, knowledge about something, and knowledge how to do something, etc.) separately from content or behavior artifacts such as documents, data files, and program code. This knowledge is encoded in a digital form that both people and machines can access and interpret. The basic shift in information and communications technology (ICT) that is occurring now is from informationcentric to knowledge-centric patterns of computing. This is made possible by the application of semantic technologies and open standards that enable people and machines to connect, evolve, share, and use knowledge on an unprecedented scale and in new ways that make our experience of the internet better. Not restricted just to current Semantic Web standards, the next stage of internet evolution will encompass a broad range of knowledge representation and reasoning capabilities including microformats, semantic html, pattern detection, deep linguistics, ontology and model based inferencing, analogy
and reasoning with uncertainties, conflicts, causality, and values.

http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reportinfo.asp?report_id=682287&t=d&cat_id=