It might be called the next-generation Web, or the Smart Web, or something else. Its being worked on and touted by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and his cohorts at the W3C. You dont see much about it beyond white papers and academic articles, but its going to change things dramatically.

The Semantic Web is far too complex to explain in these 750 words, so Ill give you the skinny: It will allow computers and software (such as electronic agents) to pass information to one another thats understandable because whatever machine is listening will have the ability to discover the meaning and context of whatever terms the speaker is using.

Today, if one computer said to another, Juan Rico just had an accident in Sunnydale, the other computer wouldnt know what that meant unless it was sent in a format like XML in which Rico, Juan was in the policyholder field, Sunnydale was in the location field, etc.

With the Semantic Web, those computers would be able to understand each other. By using what are called ontologies, they wouldnt need to have database fields synched or mapped, because they would be able to look up the meanings of terms and put them into the context that they understand.

Ontologies also can specify relationships of terms such as accident (e.g., they involved vehicles, and possibly injury, and repair, and so on) as well as the rules for reasoning about those terms (e.g., notify claims, find body shop, etc.).

So that second computer would know to make sure that Juan Rico is a policyholder and it would know (or could find out) what an accident was. It would know that Sunnydale is a city and that cities have ZIP codes. It would know that accidents involve vehicles, and Juan Rico has a vehicle insureda 2001 Honda Accord. So now it knows that Juan Ricos 2001 Accord (red, with a V6) is in need of repair, it can act accordinglyperhaps by notifying a body shop with the same ZIP code as Sunnydale. It might also deduce that if an accident had injuries, it will require medical payments (notify medical claims department).

This is a crude example, but the real-world examples are limitless. Agents, claims reps, banks, brokerages, and carriers will be able to exchange information thats not necessarily in a formal database format.

Should you do anything now? As my genius/madman friend Rustin Wright would say, Put it in one of your mental processing centers for a few months and see what happens. (Unless youre with ACORD. In that case, you should be reading everything you can on this. Creating the backbone of an insurance-industry semantic Web is your ball to drop.)

Several quantum leaps in technology are poised to make it into everyday technology, from digital ink, to rapid prototyping, to photonic computers. Theyre interesting in their own right, but theyre also interesting for this industry. Get ready.

–Andrew KantorEditor-in-Chief

More on the Semantic Web
From the W3C:
www.w3.org/2001/sw
From Scientific American: www.sciam.com/previousissues.html (select May 2001)