IT and meaning: Who do you think you are?

The idea of the semantic web in Gertrude's head was now remarkably in the shape of Reginald Jeeves - well informed, perceptive, sensitive to needs, quick, personal, relevant and perhaps even manipulative.

Part of what was now happening all around, she thought as she sat pondering on her sprained ankle, was that everything needed to have a meaning and be relevant to anybody who used the internet.

How does a group of alphabets be understood meaningfully by an illiterate computer? Apparently by structuring. So they (you know, them, some one, that's who) create lists and lists of endless things in computers that might look something like this.

Composers: Muthuswami Dikshitar, Sebastian Bach, Tan Dun, Ali Farka Toure

Types of Music: Classical, Folk, Film, Western, African,

Century: 18, 19, 20, 21

These lists have to be kept in a structure that some people have agreed on and follow some rules and grammar that those people have agreed. Some of these rules are called RDF and OWL. RDF is Resource Description Format and Web Ontology Language has been mysteriously abbreviated to OWL, leaving no suspicion that we might be talking about a nocturnal hunting bird.

Gertrude doesn't know where to look for a list. She read about DBpedia having vacuumed information from Wikipedia and done clever things to them. They probably stacked up and organised and split up and sliced and reorganised and classified and chopped and referenced and cross linked all the facts from Wikipedia in some databases.

Gertrude plans to use a language called SPARQL. To start with, this language is - sparkle - grossly misspelt. It is also one of those extra-ordinary acronyms that self reference and contain another one within it, just to make her feel like a complete idiot. Would anyone have guessed that it is an acronym of Sparql Protocol and RDF Query Language? How much reading for an ordinary mortal to comprehend a mere six letter word. They'd better not use this one in the Sunday newspaper word jumble.

The plan is to use SPARQL to ask questions of this massive data store in DBpedia. Gertrude is considering learning this language when she is a bit old. Would it have evolved better or got extinct by then?

So she could know which musicians in Asia composed or performed South Indian classical music after the eighteenth century. She might know the kinds of architecture during the time of King Bruce of Scotland. However, if she learnt it a bit early, she could have her own wolfram alpha like site. May be she could get her friends Draak and Spencer to help, she muses. They are a sharp lot, she nods to herself.

As a mild distraction, Gertrude's quick fingers spell out her name on a website that declares that from her name alone, it could find her digital footprint and suggest subjects of interest to her, people who are her peers, and a provide her a personalised newsfeed. Intriguing. The results seem compelling. Very true. Like a surveillance camera on the internet, all her deeds and thoughts are concentrated into an image of word pockets. She goes back and repeats with names of various web personalities. She spells out various names, names of software rockstars, political personalities. Then she tries out less eminent personalities like her school geography teacher. Not so clever now, eh!