I’m deliberately not giving a precise definition.

What people mean by “semantic technology” is usually “Something more or less like what Tim Berners-Lee has been going on about for a long time now”, but one of my main points is that the devil is in the details.

Do you specifically mean the W3C “semantic web”? Do you mean any kind of metadata that purports to convey “here is what the data is about”? Do you include (rudimentary or more) natural language processing of the data?

The slides, podcast and video (duration 17:30) are at:

http://www.DataServicesWorld.com/People/TTague.htm

- small, trivial applications with a few hundred static documents: semantic technology not required

- everything else: benefits from semantic technology

The degree of benefit grows with query complexity, data volume, change rates of contents, and query volume on contents. Esp. public-facing sites do not necessarily require manual tagging. Entity and relationship extractions do provide an adequate means of handling the “standard” cases much more efficiently than manual efforts (esp. in cases of high data volumes) – of course, manual tagging may be an addition to that. Why? Well, human tagging tends to be biased and not tag all entities that could be tagged. If two years ago, somebody would regard “cloud computing” a marginal topic and not bother putting that into a tag, today it would be clear that needs to be done. But, who will re-tag now all the old content in the light of new and changing topics that are interesting? This is the clear case for automatic extraction, clustering and classification technologies to provide a neutral basis for search and navigation, possibly augmented by manual efforts as needed.

Best regards,
–Jürgen