“The semantic web is an extension of the current web that allows to find, share and combine information more easily”
Eric Miller – Lead W3C Semantic Web Activity
Our current representation of data over the web is unconstrained, ambiguous and not ready for machine processing. Semantic web allows us to add metadata in a more formalized way that makes it easier for machines to process our information. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web. It’s a concept by Tim Berners-Lee (founder of WWW), he describes semantic web as component of Web 3.0.
Goal of semantic web is to make standards or conventions to write meta-data on the web, as number of web conform to this convention machines can be used to process at even further level of information (by which relationships will be developed between different resources).
HTML, as it is generally deployed, has limited ability to classify the blocks of text on a page, apart from the roles they play in a typical document's organization and in the desired visual layout. The Semantic Web addresses this shortcoming using specialized descriptive technologies, thus allowing intelligent agents (machines) to determine meaning of the content, thereby facilitating information gathering and research by computers
Today most of our meta-data is presented in following way:
<meta name="author" content="Author’s Document">
It carries informal and more descriptive meaning of the content being presented in the web document. It is not machine friendly as there are as many representations of meta-data over the web as the number of websites. Hence, to gather information and research by computers we need a centralized standard or way of writing meta-data. The goal of the Semantic Web is to create a universal medium for information exchange, not only content, but meaning as well. Currently Semantic web concept is being implemented by the use of RDF, OWL and XML, while HTML describes and links between them.
I think it would be a great leap for the web sites as there is already tons of data available on social networking sites and on the blogs that can be used in a number of researches possibly, but all we need is to first have a frame work or architecture that standardize the way meaning of content is made on the web. If this concept becomes reality then we may see websites that would keep on learning, growing and be independent. AI would also benefit from it as well.
