I was sent a link late last week to a white paper over on ZDNet by some Finnish researchers looking into the possibilities of opening up the services offered by Yellow Pages to the Semantic Web. Basically, the Finns looked at the traditional Yellow Pages service (specifically in the Helsinki area, but also more broadly), and found it lacking in several key ways.

The basic idea behind Yellow Pages is to provide a directory service for the general public, and monetise the advertisements of businesses wanting more prominence in the directory. The way current services work (online, that is) leaves much to be desired when it comes to matching the requirements of both users and businesses. Businesses miss out whenever a potential customer fails to notice their ad (because they found a different listing on a different page), and the user loses whenever their search turns up wrong or incomplete results. The reasons behind this mis-match is essentially technical: search and directory tables don’t provide the flexibility required to match users and businesses together whenever linguistic (homonyms, synonyms or hyponymic…) problems occur or when a service simply fails to produce the best case for the request.

I suggest reading the paper for the more technological perspectives (you will need to join ZDNet.co.uk, though I believe it’s free of charge), but the possibilities unearthed could potentially benefit both users of Yellow Pages services and the Semantic Web community itself.

A person looking for a business or seeking an answer to a problem in his area could benefit from the fact that his Yellow Pages results will become much more focused. If he looks for a “camera shop” because his is broken, he’s much more likely to find a shop running a repair service, for example. Businesses behind the service would also benefit from their advertisements being more well-placed to attract people actually looking for them.

However, a significant benefit from this system, is that the data made available through such a service could be reused by the Semantic Web itself. Imagine developing an application and being able to tie directly into a massive, international business directory? I’m sure your imagination (if you happen to be an imaginative developer) could be enlivened by this idea.

I’d be very interested to hear what you have to say about this kind of service, and what you’d build using this kind of data. Let me know where you’d take it, and what you’d like to see from such a directory.

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