Eight friends and I travelled to Boston last weekend. We met up on Friday morning shipped out 900 kilometres to the City on the Hill. It was great. We took a tour of the city, saw MIT and Harv, I saw Sara E.

Strangely, on the way there the other vehicle got damaged, so I ended up staying an extra day withhalf the guys while that vehicle got fixed and on the way back the first vehicle had a failure.

Also, I got an e-mail from Shirley  who was leading a toru group to Boston. She said, “I’ll tlak to you next week, I ahve to leave for Boston tomorrow.” I replied, “I am in Boston.” Unfortunately we missed each other by a few hours and on her birthday.

Years ago I read an interview with Steve B when he took over for Bill G at MS. He talked about how search engines should understand what the searchers mean when they search. I heard this similar notion recently when listened to The Google Story on CD from WPL.

I disagree. It is more important that search engines understand what web pages mean.

When I search for something and get irrelevant results it isn’t only because the engine didn’t understand me, but because the engine can’t differentiate between different pages with the same search terms and machine-readable characteristics.

So that is what the “semantic web” is about, which is a concept I encountered again recently.

“The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” - Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila in http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html Entry sites are http://www.semanticweb.org/ and at the W3C http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/.