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Barney Pell of Powerset, ZuneHD business development lead Dave McLauchlan and Windows 7 gaming project manager Ruchit Garg all announced today that they are leaving Microsoft. Pell, a super-geek and the best known of the three, leaves three years and one month after his semantic startup Powerset was acquired by Microsoft before it even fully launched, for a rumored $100 million.

People come and people go from companies all the time, but for three well-known names from Microsoft to depart in one day has got to be dispiriting. Hopefully, when smart people leave giant companies, it means they will create something new and fabulous elsewhere.

The Semantic Web is all about structuring data so that humans and computers can more easily interpret the Web and discover relevant data for a wide variety of purposes. Google, a company built on the ability to advertise based on contextual data, announced today a major acquisition in the Semantic Web space. As of today, Metaweb, maker of Freebase and a leader in the Semantic Web, has joined forces with Google.

It's been more than ten years since Tim Berners-Lee first spoke about the semantic web and computers indexing all web-based data. He said, "The day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize." Since then a handful of companies have attempted to tackle the issue of machine-based indexing and language interpretation. None of them are perfect. Below are 6 unique approaches to semantic data collection.

Perhaps the biggest problem with natural language search is that it's incredibly difficult to try and automate machine-assigned ontologies. Essentially, machines just don't get it.

This is precisely the reason why Canadian technologist Bruce Johnson switched his focus from semantic tagging to a new style of search. Says Johnson, "Machines don't really deconstruct language well. They miss so many of the ambiguities and they often don't pick up on synonyms." As a result, Johnson's Semanti was built in the belief that humans are best at determining search relevancy. ReadWriteWeb spoke to Johnson, about how his start up, differs from some of the semantic web's more-recognized players like Hakia and Powerset.

Most semantic search services are natural language search engines; however, Semanti employs a system of personal bookmarks, a drop-down menu with multiple definitions, and search recommendations pulled from Facebook friends. Semanti actually increases relevancy by introducing human eyes and opinions into the search process.

In this article, we'll analyze the trends and technologies that power the Semantic Web. We'll identify patterns that are beginning to emerge, classify the different trends, and peak into what the future holds.

In a recent interview Tim Berners-Lee pointed out that the infrastructure to power the Semantic Web is already here. ReadWriteWeb's founder, Richard MacManus, even picked it to be the number one trend in 2008. And rightly so. Not only are the bits of infrastructure now in place, but we are also seeing startups and larger corporations working hard to deliver end user value on top of this sophisticated set of technologies.