What is this peculiar term called Semantics?

If you heard the word semantics for the first time in your life and puzzled as to what this supernatural awkward word is all about, I must confess that you are no different from me. The first time when I came across this word I wondered what the exact meaning of this would be. So I used my favorite google define option. There we go with the meaning of the word semantics as "the study of language meaning". Then came up the real puzzle. What is the damn use of this in the context of computing?

We have been using computers for decades. Everything that we have been doing with computers were mostly based upon keywords (sets of characters). The searches, data entry, processing and all these are just merely been done based upon just sets of characters. Let's take a simple example where you search for something on web. Suppose you type the word "Kennedy" in your favourite search engine and hit enter. You will be able to get results starting from John F Kennedy, Kennedy Space Center, the assassination of president Kennedy and so on. All these results are based upon the instances where you have the word 'Kennedy' present. But what if you were to get information on a particular singer in South Africa whose name is Kennedy? The search engines that you have today are not capable of identifying the meanings of the words that they are dealing with and these algorithms used today are merely based upon just keywords, character sets and pattern matching etc.

The Semantics in computing proposes an era where where we use the meanings of the words instead of the just sets of characters when processing. If we take the typical example of searching, you will no longer be going after the instances where your search keywords are present but analyze the meaning of the terms and then go on searching where you find similar contexts. In case of the above example your search engine do not go on searching the words 'Kennedy' and list down all instances but it will show you several contexts of 'Kennedy' where it stands as a name of a former president of United States, Space Center, Singers and so on.

In semantics we have value added data in which we actually know what they really imply. We have relationships with different word entities and we know what they really mean. This helps us to be more accurate and intelligent in our day to day processing using computers. For an example the web browsers that you use today are actually do know nothing about what they render and show you. But if they are semantically enabled, they will know what is really out there in those pages and may be they would arrange the web page intelligently according to your tastes.

The knowing the actually meaning and the context of information which is circulating inside a computer system will enable many functions that are really astonishing. This can affect almost every field of computing and take a tremendous turn. Semantics itself will be able to create a new era of computing.

But there are many obstacles in bringing these promises down to your finger steps. The next few posts will be on these issues, new trends and concepts which are emerging with Semantics. One of the most astonishing concepts of this era is Semantic Web or the future WWW. We will discuss these in detail in the next few posts.