Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a project of the W3C in which automated methods based on good quality metadata are used to make the information on the internet understandable by computers so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.

The Semantic Web is an idea of the inventor of the world wide web "Tim Berners Lee" who wants to make the web more intuitive about how to serve a user's needs. The semantics of information and services is defined in a formal description in Web Ontology Language and RDF Schemas. These are used to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

Tim Berners-Lee's Idea was as follows:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, 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.

— Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Markup

The World Wide Web is based on HTML documents. The semantic web involves using Resource description Framework (RDF) containing data that computers use. The layout details used in HTML will be stored separately such as in a CSS file. RDF and OWL can either supplement or replace the contant of web documents (XHTML).

In this way a machine can process knowledge itself, using processes similar to human reasoning, thereby obtaining more meaningful results.