Relationship Web: Blazing Semantic Trails between Web Resources

Using keywords as inputs to search engines and receiving documents as responses remains the prevalent way to access information on the Web. Although a shift toward entity awareness is a fairly recent trend in information access, such methods remain devoid of semantics, which are increasingly recognized as the lynchpin of search, integration, and analysis. We argue that relationships are at the heart of semantics, and, as such, we envision a Web of relationships to relate content across Web resources. Under this powerful new paradigm, information access over the Web would switch from a mere document-retrieval operation to an information framework that supports insight elicitation and semantic analytics over Web resources. In this column, we outline our vision and discuss how recent Improvements in content extraction and semantic annotation will ultimately help us realize this relationship Web.