A Mobile Web That Knows All About You

A motivation as seen on TheFeature:

"The problem with smart phones and personal digital assistants is that, without the necessary contextual information, they can't be smart or personal. That's where the Semantic Web comes in."

"Berners-Lee, who heads up the World Wide Web Consortium in Cambridge, Massachusetts, calls his idea the Semantic Web. It's a set of standards and protocols designed to make the data on the Web not only machine-readable, but also machine-understandable. For instance, consider the way today's comparison shopping agents work. They're designed to crawl through various online sites and pull price information from the product listings and present the compiled results to the user. The crawling software has to be hand-tuned to extract the price information from each site. This process, known as "screen-scraping," is time consuming and brittle, because if a retailer changes the way its products are listed, the software breaks.

But in a semantically-enabled Web world, retailers will have the option of formatting the information on their sites with metadata (data about data) that would allow a Semantic Web agent to grab and process the data even if the site design changes."