Semantic Web Should Improve Search

So I got the flu the other day. It was probably passed to me via my elementary school-age kids who also had a mild case. The weird thing is, three of us each acquired an unusual eye twitch, all starting within a day or so of each other. I was curious if this might be a common symptom of the flu, maybe related to body aches or something. So I did some Internet searching e.g. using 'flu "eye twitch"' and did not find anything in the first page of results that associated the two conditions. I did find lots of pages where eye twitch was discussed, and flu was mentioned elsewhere in the page (often in an advertisement). I pondered my search failure, and accepted that popular search engines using term co-occurrence always run the risk of returning irrelevant content. What would really improve search is the clue that flu and eye twitch are both medical conditions, and my query is whether one condition is related to another, e.g. via a symptom-of relationship. On subsequent searching I did find two blog posts (Eyelid Twitching and Eye Twitch) that each discuss associations between flu viruses and eye twitches. While I've still read nothing official, there is apparently some anecdotal evidence out there to support the hypothesis that a flu virus may cause eye twitches. I look forward to the day when search engines will recognize mentions of e.g. medical conditions and domain-specific relations in text, and when the corresponding search interfaces offer users ways to specify semantic queries.

Semantic Web Case Studies

I read The Semantic Web In Action Scientific American article Prof. Chen recommended to us. I've been particularly interested to learn more about whether and how businesses are benefiting from the semantic web and/or semantic integration efforts. I want to point out that the article cites the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group which has compiled a number of case studies and use cases. It will take some time to go through the case studies in detail, but they clearly represent a valuable resource for understanding what about the semantic web is working and what challenges remain.