UK: Government to invest £30 million in Semantic Web

The British government will invest £30 million (US$45 million) in a research centre to further develop Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web, writes Joab Jackson for IDG News Service. The Institute for Web Science will be run by Berners-Lee, who formulated the basic protocols for the web, along with University of Southampton artificial intelligence professor Nigel Shadbolt.

"This institute will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies and ensure the government is taking the right funding decisions to position the UK as a world leader," said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in a statement.

The Semantic Web is Berners-Lee's vision for how the web should evolve beyond its origins as a worldwide repository of human-readable hyperlinked documents. By using linked data, machines should be able to make inferences and reason about data found they find on the web, without human intervention, in effect turning the web into a worldwide database.
Full report on the PC World site