Semantic Web

We're all somehow looking for meaning. The meaning of life, usually during puberty or other crises, the meaning of signs, when we try to find our way through traffic in a foreign city, or the meaning of words when reading a poem or talking to a member of the opposite sex.

In the semantic web, we are interested in the meaning of data. Data is all around us and many people have the feeling that there is just too much of it to make some sense. Due to the vast amount of data available these days, it is crucial to have little helpers that guide our ways to find the data we really need. Computers. The Internet. Ontologies.

Unfortunately it is not easy to make a computer understand anything, especially things it doesn't "expect". The more basic it seems in terms of human understanding, like seeing, recognizing objects, recognizing similarities or finding an acceptable excuse for missing a deadline, the more problems computers have solving these tasks.