Please join us as Phillip Rhodes gives us a glimpse into the future of the internet - the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web is the name given to Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the next generation of the World Wide Web. On today's web, most data is provided in a format which is easy for humans to understand, but which computer programs have trouble understanding. This makes it difficult for us to program computers to perform useful, time-consuming tasks for us, using data retrieved over the Web.

As the Semantic Web vision unfolds and more data is provided in "structured data" form, it will become increasingly easy to develop programs which can appear to act much more intelligent in terms of how they interact with the web and with each other. This will provide the potential for a huge surge in productivity as we enable computers to perform lower-value tasks for us, freeing people to focus on tasks which require human creativity.

We are still a long way from the kind of "Artificial Intelligence" that we have seen in science-fiction programmes and movies, but the Semantic Web moves us forward in our evolution of adapting technology to simplify our lives.