Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, has been riffing on the “semantic web” – where the current repository of static pages will be turned into a vast, interlinked global database – for more than a decade.

According to standards body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), of which he is director, all information online will be categorised and “new queries can combine categories in any imaginable way”.

The potential of this for organisations and individuals is enormous – for example, letting them aggregate data from anywhere into compelling new applications, form ad hoc collaborative ventures and dramatically improve their business intelligence.

Berners-Lee has spent much of the past five years calling on governments and businesses to support the idea. Meanwhile, W3C has been working on standards to enable the transition.

Existing protocols have already brought the semantic web several steps closer, but now W3C has released what could be the critical piece of the puzzle: the Rule Interchange Format (RIF). Essentially, RIF overcomes the obstacle of data being categorised in different ways by different sites and developers.

If, as is likely, we see widespread adoption of these standards, the changes could be rapid and dramatic – yet almost imperceptible. As W3C systems architect Sandro Hawke says: “It’ll happen so quickly no one will know. They’ll just notice the internet doing more cool things.”