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Much of the talk at the 2006 World Wide Web conference in Edinburgh this week has been about the technologies behind the so-called "semantic web". according to the BBC.

Professor Wendy Hall, head of a research team at the University of Southampton looking into the semantic web says that part of the problem is that the term means so many things to different people. However, she believes it can be summed up as "creating a web that can be interpreted by machines".

Creating web pages that are marked up Semantically, is not that complicated. It’s actually a more efficient way of creating web pages so that they can be understood by not just your computer browser; but by all sorts of machines and on line applications - including Search Engines.

A good example is to compare a web page to a catalogue. Rather than put all the information in willy-nilly and un-categorised, you specify what’s what. It makes it instantly more searchable and understandable. It allows for automatic understanding of data. For example, by putting some text in between tags: <h1>This tells the whole world that it is an important header</h1>. It’s obviously slightly more complicated than that but it is (in our minds) common sense to speak a global language. It makes the Internet, and the billions of web pages, more relevant and accessible - across the board.

At The Escape, we have also found that it is not only a more efficient way of working, giving you untold flexibility to edit and update your web site; but, it also makes your web site more successful because more machines (search engines) can read it and, more importantly, make sense of it.

It is the way forward as the Internet continues to mature. A good start to find out how your site does is to run it through the validator.