Traditional semantics is the science of meaning in a language. But on the WWW it’s got new meaning. Perhaps you’ve heard the term Semantic Web and wondered what that’s all about. There’s a non-technical keynote speech from the Breakthrough ‘09 conference, a iMedia marketing summit, by Linguist David Crystal which explains this concept rather well (March 22-25, 2009). You can watch the video here. For a written summary, visit this page.

Although this conference is about marketing, advances in the semantic web could be important for education, too. One of the issues teachers have using the Internet in classrooms center around filtering and blocking so that inappropriate sites and ads aren’t viewable to students.  The main idea about the semantic web is to provide contextually appropriate material (ads) to viewers.

Perhaps this can also be applied to searching, and a coding entry  (XML) can be inserted to prevent inappropriate web pages and ads from appearing in schools more accurately. I also thought it interesting that he has identified about 3,000 knowledge base categories for classifying data.

David Crystal has written many books and articles. An interesting one is txtng the gr8 db8 and his article The joy of txt. Spotlight, November, 16-21addresses concerns about texting and language usage: “The more children text, the more they’re reading and writing.” From his Biography “David Crystal is currently patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) and the Association for Language Learning (ALL), president of the UK National Literacy Association, and an honorary vice-president of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, the Institute of Linguists, and the Society for Editors and Proofreaders.” He’s also got a blog at http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/.