Comments

It's important to make a distinction here between "semantic" as in "semantic web" and semantics—being the study or use of meaning in language itself. Cognition, Powerset and other services are actually about Natural Language Processing. This is a complimentary area of development to the Semantic Web, but by no means its main proponent. The Semantic Web is actually about making information machine-readable through the use of RDF (Resource Description Framework) and other methods (Microformats and others)to actually wrap information in machine-readable bundles, so the software dealing with the user's request is able to use the information as data. Language processing is a parallel area of development about allowing people to interact better with machines through more naturalistic linguistic processes.