The world wide web delivers a bewildering array of information sited in over 14 billion pages. And while search engines such as Google and Yahoo have made the task of searching for content easier, it can still feel like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. The semantic web promises to change that.

The concept of the semantic web already has some prestigious backers, including web co-founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Fundamentally, it is an attempt to solve the problem of finding information by addressing how online content can be made ‘machine readable’, empowering search engines with a clear understanding of context.

Forget the hype of Web 2.0, with its simplistic, user-based ranking schema, the semantic web – its proponents say – represents the next evolution of the Internet.

The semantic web is basically “an extension to the current web providing an ability to integrate data,” says John Darlington, business development manager at the University of Southampton. There are many users and organisations that have a problem with integrating silos of data and the semantic web provides the type of technologies that will hopefully help them, he says.

So why is this important to the hard-pressed IT executive? CIOs need to appreciate that the semantic web is about how all organisations understand data, says Darlington. Just as the web began as basic intranet servers, the semantic web may start small, but it too will help redefine how information is shared. “Don’t just think of the semantic web as something that is going to happen ‘out there’. These technologies will happen inside organisations,” he says.

The development of the world wide web by Berners-Lee at the Switzerland-based particle physics laboratory CERN from 1990 onwards, was influenced by the need to share information more effectively. That is still a problem for many of today’s business leaders.

This ability to share information more effectively can been seen in projects such as the mapping of the human genome. To fully understand such a complex mechanism, “we need the whole world’s scientists mapping bits of the human genome, and then be able to pull it all together,” says Darlington.

The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) – a collaborative effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton – is empirically investigating the technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the web.

This work will feed into efforts already underway to develop standards for the semantic web, like Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL) and SPARQL, a query language for RDF. These standards are to “data what other ones, such as HTML, were to documents,” says Darlington.

There are currently many organisations and public sector bodies, such as the Office of Public Sector Information, that are modelling data using RDF and building SPARQL access. These are not expected to replace existing applications or databases yet, but once the semantic web takes hold within the organisation, the next step will be delivering it to partners and suppliers. And once these technologies become more ubiquitous, new applications are expected to build on the back of the semantic web towards the end of the decade.

Soon there will be a next generation of web technology, says Darlington, that offers the exciting prospect of context, as well as content. Business leaders must consider the potential benefits this can bring, and beware the consequences of being left behind.