The quest for a semantic web has been around for years now and a lot of standards are the result of this quest.

Dublin Core and RDF are methods to assign semantic meta information onto documents. Computers can use these meta information to assign relationships between documents, authors, locations, time-frames, languages and intentions.

In february, Reuters launched a web service called Calais, that reads an unstructured document and returns semantic meta information after a thorough text and concept analysis.

An interesting question is, of course, why bother? What's the benefit to the internet world?

Information on the internet is usually published with a purpose. Most of the information, I suppose, are published to be read. The information is seeking attention. Your attention.

And there's the catch: as a large percentage of published information has a clear economic motivation (read: advertising), the battle for our attention has become more difficult.

Our prefererence for unhealthy foods (salty, fat, and sugared stuff), that are the result of millenia of starvation and the concept of survival of the fittest have an informational equivalent: a preference for easy and archetypical important information: who's the boss, with whom can I breed and who and where is the enemy.
That's information that appeals to our oldest brain parts. The universality of yellow press, which exists in every culture, continent and form reflects on the internet too.

See google zeitgeist's top ten in searchwords.
The semantic web however could be the digital equivalent to the now mandatory nutrition information on industrially processed food.

A search engine could filter the retrieved information for the sort of information you really are looking for. If you want sex, crime, and gossip, you'll get exactly that. That's not really different from google today. But if you need scientific, educational or quotable information, you could get those too.

Internet technology will stay exciting, as will there be new challenges for advertisers, marketers and publishers with these new technologies. Just stay focused.