The Semantic Real Estate Listing

Had your fill of Web 2.0? Not to worry, Web 3.0 is on it's way. The latest buzz in the world of computer science is what has been dubbed the "semantic web". This month's issue of Business 2.0 has an article that does an excellent job of explaining the concept that some say will completely revolutionize the web as we know it now. The web that we work with each day is nothing more than a compilation of documents designed to be read by humans. As the article aptly points out, we can add keywords and meta data to make them easier to find, but they are not what is referred to as "machine readable" which is defined as a way for a computer to read and recognize the content it is presented with. Think of it as OCR ("optical character recognition") for everything on the web. In essence, the concept of a semantic web offers the ability for computers to reason the relationship of everything hosted in the proper format.

The B 2.0 article gave a good analogy of looking at the difference between today's web and a semantic web as the difference between 2D and 3D. It has some pretty far reaching implications for real estate listing data. If you look at at a listing from a semantic point of view, the listing becomes an object. This object becomes instantly connected to a network of other objects with a specific relations to one another (Videos,photos,community information,school information,comparable sales,shopping and services,tax data so on and so forth). Today, in order to make those connections, a human has to build the relational connections from one data set to another. The promise of this new technology is such that through "smart agents", the web can be culled to produce all of these results, instantly and with more relevance. Some view it as artificial intelligence for the web.

There are companies like Radar Networks in the process of building data standards and tools that could give us the ability to start using the web in a way that is much smarter and faster. But as the article points out, it's kind of a "chicken and egg" scenario. If history is any lesson regarding the ground breaking emergence of world changing technology, it will take longer than the pundits predict to come to any meaningful fruition. It will be interesting to see who the early movers are in the real estate space when it comes to this technology.

The following graphic is by no means an exhaustive list of what the "objects " could be, in fact, they are what came to me off the top of my head. What do you envision as objects or uses of semantic technology?