Today I gave a talk to a group of my peers at the Internet Briefing group where I examined some of the trends in the areas of:

• the semantic web,
• web development tools and
• web / cloud infrastructure platforms.

A lively discussion followed. Judging by the number of questions, there was a lot of interest among participants about the potential of the semantic Web. I highlighted two of the standards, RDFa and SPARQL that are available today e.g. in Web Content Frameworks like Drupal. Semantically marking up content can also lead to better search experiences using for example Yahoo's SearchMonkey.

An important component of Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the semantic web is to enable more automated processing of information. This would allow us to start thinking about the web as a giant database which is what makes SPARQL an interesting standard. See Tim Berners-Lee's talk about his vision for linked data in this TED video