Objectives of knowledge management

participate in a reverse auction.
Although the concept of the semantic web has been established for over 10 years, there 
have been relatively few commercial applications, suggesting the difficulty of implementa-
tion together with the lack of demand since the search engines perform well in returning 
relevant information. The World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3c.org) has compiled some 
examples which it updates at www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/.
Microformats
Microformats
are a practical example of the way the semantic web will develop. Data can 
be exchanged through standard microformats such as hCalendar and hReview which are 
used to incorporate data from other sites into the Google listings (see www.microformats.org 
for details). You can see examples of microformats which Google has incorporated as star 
ratings from sites it has indexed if you perform a search on movies, hotels or popular 
products.
Microformats
A simple set of formats 
based on XHTML 
for describing and 
exchanging information 
about objects, including 
product and travel 
reviews, recipes and 
event information.
(In Chapter 4 we will look briefly at how governments promote and control, through laws, 
the use of the Internet in their jurisdiction.) In this section, we look at the growth of the 
Internet as a global phenomenon and how the standards described in the previous section 
were devised. The Internet is quite different from all previous communication media since it 
is much less easy for governments to control and shape its development. Think of print, TV, 
phone and radio and you can see that governments can exercise a fair degree of control on 
what they find acceptable.
Esther Dyson (1998) has been influential in advising on the impact of the Internet on 
society; she describes