Weaving a Web of Ideas

A long, all-over-the-place article from IEEE Spectrum Online entitled "Weaving a Web of Ideas" caught my eye today (ok, that's a lie, it's been a "Read Me" bookmark for a while):

What companies like Google, Autonomy, and Verity are doing, in other words, is figuring out better ways of doing what search engines have always tried to do: deliver the best documents the existing Web has on a given topic. The advocates of the Semantic Web, on the other hand, are looking beyond the current Web to one in which agent-like search engines will be able to not just deliver documents, but get at the facts inside them as well. One thing everyone can agree on: even with its billions of pages and countless links, the Web, only a dozen years old, is still in its infancy. As Berners-Lee puts it, the next generation of the Web will be as revolutionary as the original Web itself was...