Semantic Web Points

W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF) is an XML text format that supports resource description and metadata applications, such as music playlists, photo collections, and bibliographies. For example, RDF might let you identify people in a Web photo album using information from a personal contact list; then your mail client could automatically start a message to those people to them their photos are on the Web. Just as HTML integrated documents, menu systems, and forms applications to launch the original Web, RDF integrates applications and agents into one Semantic Web. Just like people need to have agreement on the meanings of the words they employ in their communication, computers need mechanisms for agreeing on the meanings of terms in order to communicate effectively. Formal descriptions of terms in a certain area (shopping or manufacturing, for example) are called ontologies and are a necessary part of the Semantic Web. RDF, ontologies, and the representation of meaning so that computers can help people do work are all topics of the Semantic Web Activity.

2001-12-10, XML in 10 Points

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.

2001-05, The Semantic Web, Scientific American, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila

Now, miraculously, we have the Web. For the documents in our lives, everything is simple and smooth. But for data, we are still pre-Web.

2001-10-29, Business Model for the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee

This is perhaps the best way of summing up the Semantic Web -- technologies for enabling machines to make more sense of the Web, with the result of making the Web more useful for humans.

2000-10-01, The Semantic Web: A Primer, Edd Dumbill

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. It is the idea of having data on the Web defined and linked in a way that it can be used for more effective discovery, automation, integration, and reuse across various applications. The Web can reach its full potential if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people.

2001-11-05, Semantic Web Activity Statement

Information about any particular thing can be created by multiple users, served by various services and dispersed across multiple sites. Consider for example, information about the musician David Bowie. His concert schedule, tickets for these concerts, songs he's written, songs he's produced, album pricing, album reviews, his biography, books about him, movies he's in, etc., are across more than a dozen different sites. With the existing technology today, we are still in the "hunter gatherer" phase of using the Web. The Semantic Web is designed to provide the necessary infrastructure for enabling services and applications on the Web aggregate, and to integrate this information into a sum greater than the individual parts.

2001-11-05, Semantic Web Activity Statement

One of the best things about the Web is that it's so many different things to so many different people. The coming Semantic Web will multiply this versatility a thousandfold. For some, the defining feature of the Semantic Web will be the ease with which your PDA, your laptop, your desktop, your server, and your car will communicate with each other. For others, it will be the automation of corporate decisions that previously had to be laboriously hand-processed. For still others, it will be the ability to assess the trustworthiness of documents on the Web and the remarkable ease with which we'll be able to find the answers to our questions -- a process that is currently fraught with frustration.

The Semantic Web In Breadth, Aaron Swartz