Apparently a good deal of what I was describing last night is what people are after when they are talking about the Semantic Web:

“The idea is to weave a Web that not only links documents to each other but also recognizes the meaning of the information in those documents—a task that people can ordinarily do quite well but is a tall order for computers, which can’t tell if ‘head’ means the leader of an organization or the thing on top of a body. ‘The Semantic Web is really data that is processable by machine,’ says Berners-Lee, who is director of the MIT-based World Wide Web Consortium. ‘That’s what the fuss is about.’

Today’s World Wide Web is fundamentally a publishing medium—a place to store and share images and text. Adding semantics will radically change the nature of the Web—from a place where information is merely displayed to one where it is interpreted, exchanged and processed. Semantic-enabled search agents will be able to collect machine-readable data from diverse sources, process it and infer new facts. “