The ideas of semantic web [1] were proposed by Tim Berners-Lee early around 1997 - creating a web where information can be interpreted by machines. Since that there were much buzz around it, but very few noticable results.

But this week I was in Salzburg and saw 40 highly enthusiastic people – all from CMS vendor companies and research institutions – all talking about Semantic Technologies for CMSs. It was IKS Early Adopters Workshop [2]. IKS [3] is a 8,5 Mio EUR EU-funded proejct running 4 years (2009-2012). IKS stays for Interactive Knowledge Stack and it should enable small to medium CMS providers to use semantic-based technologies. At the current stage the major requirements are collected and first prototypes are starting to evolve. First of them is FISE [4] which allows to try out technologies and test the architectures. Semantic Editor [5] is another important part of the project and the guys from this team have some bright ideas – not only about adding semantic to content but about editing content in CMS in general.

It is yet too early to say, how semantic technologies will change the CMS landscape next years, but we will observe IKS development with great interest and hope that in 2 years semantic technologies are reality.

Links:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
[2] http://wiki.iks-project.eu/index.php/Workshops/EAworkshop
[3] http://www.iks-project.eu/
[4] http://wiki.iks-project.eu/index.php/FISE
[5] http://wiki.iks-project.eu/index.php/Semantic_Editor