The Wall Street Journal’s Amir Efrati has an article (Google Gives Search a Refresh) and blog post (What Google’s Search Changes Might Mean for You) on upcoming changes Google to its search engine to exploit semantic data.

“Google is undergoing a major, long-term overhaul of its search-engine, using what’s called semantic Web search to enhance the current system in the coming years. The move, starting over the next few months, will impact the way people can use the search engine as well as how the search engine examines sites across the Web before ranking them in search results.
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A Google spokesman said the company wouldn’t comment on future search-engine features. But people familiar with the initiative say that Google users will able to browse through the company’s “knowledge graph,” or its ever-expanding database of information about “entities”—people, places and things—the “attributes” of those entities and how different entities are connected to one another.
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Some open standards come from the W3C Semantic Web and Schema.org, which the major search engine players including Google have agreed to recognize, Cornett said.