Post by guest blogger Becky Mohr (who just relocated from LA to our Northern Virginia office. *sniff!*)
I’ll bet you never thought the Los Angeles design community could learn something from the Washington, D.C. design community, but I’m here to say you can… and should.
Apparently the new biggest thing for Web developers in the nation’s capitol is the SEMANTIC WEB. And as if it wasn’t hard enough to find a good Web Developer who knew HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, all the important companies in D.C. are looking for Web Developers who ALSO understand the Semantic Web.
Just to keep LA from falling behind, I’ll give you the skinny:
The “Semantic Web� refers to the ideal situation in which data would have no technological boundaries like viewing apparatus, data base access, platforms, or programming language. So basically, whether you were calling up data from your laptop, your PDA, or a jumbotron in Times Square, you could still get the same information.
Furthermore, in this ideal situation you would be able to pull up your favorite shows from DIRECTV's database in your PDA’s calendar, pull Wikipedia entries next to the songs in your iPod, and download instances of charitable giving from World Vision into your Turbo Tax program.
“Semantic Web� is a broad term that defines both the philosophy and programming rules needed to achieve the ideal. Most importantly, the whole thing began with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web!
To learn more, check out:
World Wide Web Consortium’s “Semantic Web� section
or this
Video Interview with Berners-Lee
To REALLY learn more, check out this conference put on by the Information Architecture Institute
From my coast to yours!
Becky
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