| That perspective assumes a result-consumers-have-strong-ai version. That's not what i think will happen and it's not the only thing that can happen because i think that misses some pieces of the picture. IMHO, the other pieces of the picture, and what i see happening, is search engines or a service, will index entities and relationships ( in the ontology sense ), and return results enriched with that data through something like an extended microdata vocabulary. There will be an API where machine consumers can query entities and relationships, and see those attributed to their sources in the webpage. This prediction is nothing new and has been consistently foretold by ai and information retrieval augurs for decades. The difference is that I see this moving beyond the realm of expert systems in large corporations and into the realm of being an API generally accessible to anyone. I think it's very possible that, as you say, a current incumbent search engine may not consider the provision of such a service its job. Which makes things very interesting for potential new entrants in the semantic search market. Other business types could surely supply these entities and relationships however who better to be involved in the supply chain than search engines because they hold a hose containing nearly all the world's information, and in the other hand a market hungry for all the world's information. But this type of service could be niche because most humans are not going to care about getting ontology data in their search results. So even though parsing out entities and relationships could improve the usefulness and accessibility of information there might not be enough universal demand for someone like Google to really care about it. With these caveats, I think the trend from information, to knowledge, is a very natural and already apparent progression for search engines. The type of API described here is possible today given the right incentives. |