in all the discussion of the Web, we tend to get lost in the buzz and the technical detail. There's plenty to distract--the sheer numbers and the rapid growth, the boom and bust economics of dot com companies, the flashy new technologies. It's easy to forget at times that the Web on some level isn't about solving whole new problems of computing, but solving some longstanding ones in an open and scalable fashion, where the sources of the data are readily available and not centralized. Take the problem of search. There are so many technologies, and so many approaches to the problem, that we may forget at times that the ultimate goal of search technology is simple--providing users with quick access to meaningful information.In the recent history of content management, much has been made of XML and the related standards, streaming media and Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), and the steady increases in performance through broadband options such as DSL and cable modems. Yet one of the biggest challenges the Web faces is one of its oldest, and indeed is a problem that predates the Web itself. How do average users find the information they need amidst a flood of irrelevant matter? And how do they do this quickly, easily, and consistently? According to some, the path to improved information retrieval on the Web lies in intelligently applied taxonomies. In this view, content needs to be more accurately identified by category in such a way that search engines and other navigational aids can be better tuned to help the user. As content moves increasingly to the Web, these data sources need to benefit from technologies and techniques that allow people to view, navigate, and search data by broadly understood categories. Happily, categorization technologies seem to have matured to the point where they can be useful to more and more publishers.
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