How semantic search might work - Vint Cerf reveals the way forward

Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the internet, gave a lecture to the British Computer Society in London. I interviewed him afterwards about IPv6 and why we are running out of internet addresses. But we also spoke about something he had mentioned in his lecture about semantic search. This is the one of the holy grails of the web at the moment - the idea that, at its simplest, a search engine will be able to tell when you are looking for Jaguar the car and not jaguar the cat and discard the irrelevant search results. Lots of people are working on it, including, as you would expect, Google, for whom Vint is the "chief internet evangelist".

But he talked about how Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, his website is here, is working on how to make the semantic web and semantic search work "from the bottom up" by enabling web page creators to provide what Vint called semantic hyperlinks.

Here's what he said: "When you are creating a webpage and you believe that there is something relevevant out on the web, you build into the web page hyperlinks. What Tim is trying to do is create the same type of capability for people to introduce the same type of link for pointing up ambiguities of meaning - semantic hyperlinks.

"Let's suppose you were writing about jaguars and in addition to pointing to places that had information about jaguar the animal, you also know there are pages about Jaguar the car and Jaguar the operating system. You might say 'oh, this is a possible source of confusion. I am going to put a semantic hyperlink to the places that talk about cars or the places that talk about animals.

"The hyperlink says: 'Jaguar shows up in both places but my meaning is about the animal and this meaning is about the car or the operating system. Please pay attention to this semantic distinction.'

"This has a wonderful bottom-up character. It is the contribution of meaning by the users of the net that builds up into a body of understanding. Tim is creating a new kind of vocabularly and allowing other people to make use of it."

This wikipedia-style of building the semantic web from the ground up is a fascinating development. One to watch.

And while we are talking about Vint, I might add that his main message was that internet service providers were being "irresponsible" by not putting IPv6 in front of consumers. I called BT, the UK's biggest ISP, for comment and for them to tell me what they were doing. The press office had a whole day to get back to me. They couldn't find anyone to talk about it. Which I think says a lot.