Click To Play

Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who invented the organizational system for the World Wide Web, has been an advocate for a more organized Web, something he calls the "semantic" Web.

This new system of organizing Web pages in a unified system, something akin to a giant Dewey Decimal system where pages have different identifiers and can be cross referenced and linked, is coming to the world of video via Joost, which is inserting identifying tags called RDF’s into the XML cipher. 

Earlier that month, I interview Philippe Le Hegaret, who works with Berners-Lee at the World Wide Consortium, headquartered on the the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Philippe is chief architect of domain services.

He explains the current implementation of the RDF into science research documents, new software from Oracle and in videos from Joost.

Here’s what Joost’s CTO Dirk-Willem van Gulik said earlier that year about RDF in Technology Review:

…….Dirk-Willem van Gulik calls

"XML on
steroids." RDF allowed developers to write software without worrying about
widely varying content-use restrictions or national regulations, all of which
could be accommodated afterwards using RDF's Semantic Web linkages.

Joost's RDF infrastructure plus means that users will have wide-ranging
control by the service, van Gulik adds. citizens will be able to program their
own virtual TV networks–if an advertiser wants its own "channel," say, or an
environmental group wants to bring topical composition to its members–by using the
vigorous search and filtering ­capacity inherent in the semantic ordering of
details.

How much video indexing will evolve to that "semantic" platform, is hard to say.  Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web reports that BBC is exploring the system.  that is a trend to watch in 2008.

You can grab my interview with Philippe right here.

– Andy Plesser