Currently the focus of a W3C working group, the Semantic Web vision was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web changed the way we communicate, the way we do business, the way we seek information and entertainment – the very way most of us live our daily lives. Calling it the next step in Web evolution, Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.”
In the Semantic Web data itself becomes part of the Web and is able to be processed independently of application, platform, or domain. This is in contrast to the World Wide Web as we know it today, which contains virtually boundless information in the form of documents. We can use computers to search for these documents, but they still have to be read and interpreted by humans before any useful information can be extrapolated. Computers can present you with information but can’t understand what the information is well enough to display the data that is most relevant in a given circumstance. The Semantic Web, on the other hand, is about having data as well as documents on the Web so that machines can process, transform, assemble, and even act on the data in useful ways.
Continued atWhat is the Semantic Web?.