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W is for Web
Are you looking for a quiet hotel for your next holidays in the Périgord?
Why not search one of the largest “data banks” in the world: the web!
To find a place to stay on your fine-dining trip, you will use a search engine.
This software finds the pages containing the words “Hotel” and “Périgord”. But it will only look for those pages... It will ignore any containing the words “Guest house” and “Périgueux”, while including the website of the "Hôtel du Périgord"... which is actually in Strasbourg.
Researchers are currently designing the “semantic web” to solve this problem: each word is associated with different concepts, which are themselves interlinked. A search engine based on this principle associates guest houses and hotels and knows that, regardless of its name, a hotel in Strasbourg is not in the Périgord!
Did you know...?
The techniques of the semantic web are not limited to Internet sites. They can be used by the employees of a business to pool their technical knowledge, including the links between different pieces of information. With such a tool, we can understand, amongst other things, how a fault in one device affects others in a production line.
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