The problem with writing about technology is that in most cases the vendors we talk to, the products we cover and the trends we predict are quite a long way from reality. Not that organisations today won't eventually catch up, but only a handful of first-movers will actually be reading our pieces and seriously thinking about investing in product x.

I've covered the semantic web in quite a lot of detail before, but it's always been at a very hypothetical level - difficult to get past concepts and cement it in reality. Well, according to John Davies, head of next generation web research at BT, that is about to change. The last 12 to 18 months has seen a flurry of activity among firms as they try to apply semantic web technology to solve business problems and improve efficiency, make more money and so on.

Now the RDF and OWL ontology languages have been firmly established by industry body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) we could be on the cusp of seeing real world applications of the technology. Yahoo for example recently announced its support for the semantic web with a new project called Search Monkey. The search giant will be asking web site providers to make available more structured data so that the firm can present it in a less random way. According to Davies in trials search enhanced by this technology recorded a 15 per cent increase in relevancy. It could be the boost Yahoo needs to challenge the mighty Google, which has so far stayed pretty quiet about semantic web standards, although you can be sure that this won't remain the case for very long.

Organisations can also use the technology internally to great effect, for example in intranets - it could boost knowledge management initiatives by enabling people to reach the information they need quickly. It could also help in information integration projects across multiple siloed databases, said Davies.

The great and good from the semantic web community will come together in Vienna for the European Semantic Technology Conference. It will be interesting to find out exactly how much of the audience is composed of business leaders and how many are academics - it could give us a telling insight into exactly how far we are from widespread use of the technology.