Content is king, an annoyingly loud, ostentatious, and over-bearing king. I’m hunting for a new car and I’m drowning in content: auto-makers’ websites, reviews, test reports, consumer opinions, and dealer listings. I’ve retrieved hundreds of pages in total, costing me countless hours of time. The amount of useful information I’ve extracted is minuscule by comparison. I care about a few precious details of safety, fuel economy, and the overall value. The rest is just noise.

What makes this car shopping so painful is that the content is not organized based on my interests. It’s organized by the publishers. Unfortunately, reading about cars is not the task at-hand. I simply want to find my dream vehicle (if I can call a safe, economical, and value-priced vehicle a dream.)

In my last post, I argued that we need to stop organizing content for people and start helping them consume content to get tasks done. Semantic data figures prominently in that. Today, semantics is a second-class citizen, subordinate to content. But in this new world of task-oriented information, semantics may challenge content as the king of our online attention.

In any discussion of semantics, the conversation invariably begins: what do you mean by semantics? We don’t yet have a shared understanding of the term. Despite the glut of definitions, confusion reigns. Most definitions have in common an attribute of “meaning” (an ironically empty description). Most generally agree that it is a form of metadata, ascribing some meaning to other information or objects. Thereafter, the definitions are all over the map.

A detail that is often overlooked is that semantic data is an abstraction, a shadow of the actual thing it is describing. It includes only what’s necessary yet sufficient to convey the meaning. This quality of abstraction is the most compelling and powerful aspect of semantic data because it also encapsulates the essence of information consumption. Semantics is what becomes of content when it is consumed.

Semantic data holds the potential of bringing a highly personal, task-oriented perspective to our online experience. It is an abstraction of just those actionable details that matter to you. In the world of information consumption, semantics is king.

Of course, content isn’t going away. There will always be a place for the rich experience that only content can provide. We will always want to read wonderful prose, look at photos, listen to music, or watch a film. But the role of content will be greatly marginalized in task-oriented activities. If you produce content, you need to care about the ascension of semantics.

This offers a striking opportunity for those who create semantic technologies and data. As an industry, we rarely think beyond the search and retrieval of content. But content has a broad lifecycle of consumption that goes well beyond access. The most important aspects of the process remain offline. We consume it, internalize it, and make it meaningful, offline. If you can find ways of taking important, real-world activities into the world of computing, it can fuel tremendous growth.