Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a vision about an extension of the existing World Wide Web, which provides software programs with machine-interpretable metadata of the published information and data. In other words, we add further data descriptors to otherwise existing content and data on the Web. As a result, computers are able to make meaningful interpretations similar to the way humans process information to achieve their goals.

The ultimate ambition of the Semantic Web, as its founder Tim Berners-Lee sees it, is to enable computers to better manipulate information on our behalf. He further explains that, in the context of the Semantic Web, the word semantic indicates machine-processable or what a machine is able to do with the data. Whereas web conveys the idea of a navigable space of interconnected objects with mappings from URIs to resources.

The Evolving Vision of the Semantic Web

What's behind the original vision of the Semantic Web comes under the umbrella of three things: Automation of information retrieval, the Internet of Things and Personal Assistants. You can read more about all three in the seminal article by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, published in Scientific American: The Semantic Web.

With time, however, the concept evolved into two important types of data, which, taken together, implement its vision today. These are Linked Open Data and Semantic Metadata.