Semanticising search

Semantic Web search engines are few and far between – perhaps unsurprisingly given that two years ago Tim-Berners Lee said this period would be looked back on in twenty years as “the embryonic period” – but there are some in development.

Back in March, James Simmonds posted on his Semantic Web blog, rounding up Semantic Web search engines. One of the most interesting is Yahoo! Microsearch, which deviates from standard page searching and looks for content like microformats. Indeed, one of the listed examples returns the search term ‘Peter’ from Flickr, which spawns a map of users named Peter throughout the world, possible due to the location information on their Flickr profile page being recognised by Microsearch. If you’re not trying to find one of the most common first names in the Britain, searching for our office and Heriot-Watt provides map links to websites for our office and me.

This sort of example would be useful if a user could search for a photo tag and have a return of all geographical instances (where photos have been geotagged on Flickr, for example). A geography student searching for photos that have been tagged with something like ‘forest fire’ could be presented with an immediate worldwide snapshot of geotagged photos matching that description. All we need now is photo recognition software to geotag photos automatically