The Online News Association conference session on the semantic web has been scheduled on a sunny afternoon in San Francisco.

But there is still a decent turnout, demonstrating there is an interest in discovering how this idea can play a part in journalism.

Paul Berry, CTO of Huffington Post defines the semantic web as the ability to pull context from any body of text and structure or categorise it – is it angry, insightful.

Kurt Cagle of MetaphoricalWeb.org starts by messing with people’s head by saying that the semantic web is gaining meaning from meaning.

He goes on to explain that the semantic web is about assertions – about whether something is truth or not truth, and the relationship between these assertions.

Peter Offringa of CBS Interactive brings the session back to earth by talking about the semantic web as the ability to analyse text and find content.

In terms of applying these ideas in a practical sense, Berry says that a first step is tagging content. But he mentions the value of correct and incorrect tagging.

For example, HuffPost tagged their story on Heath Ledger’s death as “Keith Ledger”, as people used a misspelling of his name in searching for news of the death. The misspelled tag had 10 times the traffic that Health got.

The HuffPost also uses Adaptive Semantics to manage community and moderate comments.

Cagle argues we are moving away from brands. “We don’t have a music industry, we have thousands and thousands of industries.”

As a result, there hundreds of thousands of way of organising a category, and each of those micro-categories is also a micro-market, says Cagle.

CBS Interactive uses semantic web technologies to create topic pages on its CNET properties that pull together content in one area, explained Offringa.

It also uses semantic analysis to see what users are looking at and associate users to particular interests and products, making them valuable to advertisers.

This is only a brief summary of the session that went on to talk the technical aspects behind the semantic web, with acronyms like RDF, XQuery and Json flying across the room.