Prosperity. Happiness Works.

The internet, being a rapidly evolving phenomenon, will undoubtedly be very different in five years time.

There are two major changes that the experts agree on – Convergence and Semantics.

Convergence is all about liberating the internet from the Desktop. In the short term, it is mainly about converging the web with the mobile phone, but five years on it will mean that practically everything in your life with an electronic pulse will work together. All information and applications will communicate to such an extent that nearly every aspect of our lives will be orchestrated online. This might translate into your fridge communicating with your telephone to tell you to remember to get milk.

Semantics relates to the emergence of an intelligent web. Search engines will focus on the meaning of data on a web page. Yahoo! seem to be the forerunners in accepting and incorporating the standards and rules required to semantically deliver content, but inevitably the other search engines will follow. Once the search engines can all deliver information semantically, web developers will have to tag the content of their sites to deliver richer and more relevant content. This will mean that information will be delivered in various media in response to a search query – for example, to name but a few: text, photos and video.

An example provided my Amit Kumar, Yahoo!’s director of project managment, is a search for information on a film star. A sematics based search engine will pull together information from across the internet. You might get a biography of the actor, links to film reviews, an option to rent his back catalogue from an online video store, local cinema details, the option to book cinema tickets, information about the actors he has worked with, as well as any recent news stories or video footage of interviews and film trailers.

In essence, your searches will deliver information that you will not even realise you are looking for!

Jim Murray – Prosperity.ie