W3C Semantic Web FAQs

The vision of the Semantic Web is to extend principles of the Web from documents to data. This extension will allow to fulfill more of the Web’s potential, in that it will allow data to be shared effectively by wider communities, and to be processed automatically by tools as well as manually.

The Semantic Web allows two things.

1. It allows data to be surfaced in the form of real data, so that a program doesn’t have to strip the formatting and pictures and ads off a Web page and guess where the data on it is.
2. it allows people to write (or generate) files which explain—to a machine—the relationship between different sets of data. For example, one is able to make a “semantic link” between a database with a “zip-code” column and a form with a “zip” field that they actually mean the same – they are the same abstract concept. This allows machines to follow links and hence automatically integrate data from many different sources.

Semantic Web technologies can be used in a variety of application areas; for example: in data integration, whereby data in various locations and various formats can be integrated in one, seamless application; in resource discovery and classification to provide better, domain specific search engine capabilities; in cataloging for describing the content and content relationships available at a particular Web site, page, or digital library; by intelligent software agents to facilitate knowledge sharing and exchange; in content rating; in describing collections of pages that represent a single logical “document”; for describing intellectual property rights of Web pages (see, eg, the Creative Commons), and in many others.

Full FAQ