There’s been outbreaks of murmuring for quite a while now about “The Semantic Web”. If you don’t know what the Semantic Web is, think of it as the same Internet that you already know and love, but with a semantic layer placed over it so that you can know it a whole lot better and love it to death.

What would the semantic layer do, that would make such a difference?

It would be able to understand the meaning of all the billions of documents and web pages out there, and consequently, it could find information and web sites you were seeking out with far greater accuracy than Google-on-good-day-traveling-down-hill-with-the-wind-behind-it.

I’m about to claim that a product called Cogito from an Italian Company called Expert System can go a long way towards doing that, but in order to make the claim let me first explain the problem Cogito solves, in linguistic terms:

Most human languages are what Noam Chomsky called “Type 0” languages. Generally, this means that in an English sentence there are no hard and fast rules for “targeting” (i.e. modifying). Any word or collection of words may in various situations modify the meaning of another word in the sentence. Consider the sentence:

He hit the man with the broken stick.

He may have used the broken stick to hit the man, or he may have hit the man who happened to have a broken stick. It can mean either. It’s easy to come up with other ambiguities. A famous one is:

Fruit flies like a banana.

It may refer to “fruit flies” liking a banana, or possibly being ordered to like as banana (imperative form). It could be describing fruit flies as being like a banana, or it may be making a claim about the aerodynamic properties of fruit. When you combine individual words that have multiple meaning and you have variety in the way targeting occurs and you happen to be a computer you find it hard to pin meaning down.

Finally let me introduce my favorite sentence ever, which was created by Noam Chomsky:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

There’s no ambiguity here, but there is a mass of “illegal targeting”. Ideas, being conceptual rather than physical, cannot have color so both the adjectives here “colorless” and “green” are invalid, when used with this noun. The two adjectives are also contradictory and thus cannot target the same noun, even when the noun is a valid target. The noun “ideas” cannot target the verb “sleep”. Ideas don’t sleep, and even if they did, sleep isn’t something that can happen “furiously”. So in this sentence we have a very highly condensed lack of meaning.

What’s a computer to make of it?

But, wait a minute. Let me force some meaning into this sentence, without changing a word, just by applying metaphor.

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