Web 2.0? That's so 2009. Here's Web 3.0: Taxonomy and Semantic Search

The heart of Web 3.0 is semantics.  Semantics focuses on what one means to say, not just what one actually says.  Semantics is the difference between salient search results and an unfocused aggregation of … stuff.  Algorithms used by search engines are an effort to discern the meaning and rank relevance against users short, ambiguous, approximation of intent expressed in their search queries.  Web 3.0 semantics represents a significant advance over current search technologies because it attempts to look at meaning inherent in the content itself. 

To understand how this works and the role taxonomy plays in this search for meaning a little review maybe helpful.  Taxonomy categorizes information into a unified structure and controls the language to describe those categories.  Under this definition, the contributions of taxonomy are labeling, designing content, providing navigation patterns, and managing the relationship among content units.  These roles for taxonomy are essential to successful site development, especially as sites are increasingly dynamic, drawing content directly out of content management systems, and increasingly socialized to the point that systems rooted in databases are no longer able to scale to meet the storage demands.

Taxonomy is an integral part of a content producer's tools kit for adding metadata to their site.  Metadata presents an interpretive model for understanding content data, or the types of data actually evaluated by search engine algorithms.

The implementation of Web 3.0 has been difficult and spawned some ugly sounding technologies, such as RDF (a framework method for describing resources) and OWL (a language for establishing meaningful relationships between vocabularies for a domain of discourse), capable of producing not just knowledgeable results but actual wisdom, creative insights hidden in the data.  While taxonomists may think these semantic technologies are nifty and get to the fun part of taxonomy, they present technical and performance challenges to search engines and browsers, and to content publishers/producers. 

As a controlled metadata tool, taxonomy needs to be implemented as part of an overall content management approach.  In the content semantic environment, taxonomy needs to be embedded at the content level through both the writing and document assembly process.  Taxonomy is not an afterthought; rather, it becomes the editorial conceptual framework.  In practice, that means taxonomy expresses semantic business-rules intended to assist in achieving consistent findability of knowledge imparting –content.  Content is only content when found.

Taxonomy and metadata integration into the content creation process links it directly with search strategy and findability tactics.  Incorporating taxonomy into content production embeds a rigorous contextual structure that enables a clear, consistent voice when speaking with audiences, creating opportunities for delivering content that meets knowledge needs. 

As the technology to support a true semantic web develops, writing with rich metadata and taxonomy as business standards makes these conceptual frameworks come alive to the advanced publication and search tools.  As such, the principle of audience engagement becomes applied both to search engines and to human consumers. The result is that taxonomy is a deep, authentic end-to-end information architecture solution for enabling semantic search.