The Semantic Web is the name given to a technology that has been under development since 1998, designed in large part by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) and the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C). It is also known by other names such as “Web 3.0″ or the “Linked Online Data (LOD) Cloud”. At its core, the Semantic Web is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which is a new way to describe and link information together. RDF is to the Semantic Web what HTML (the HyperText Markup Language) is to the World Wide Web.
Better Living Through Artificial Intelligence
I believe that the Semantic Web has the potential to radically transform our lives, as it ushers in a new age of artificial intelligence that we’ve so far only seen in science fiction movies. As its adoption grows and spreads, the information contained within will touch every aspect of human life, including education, medicine, popular culture, transportation, politics, history… and beyond.
In this series of blog posts, I will attempt to illustrate how it works, and give a glimpse into the bright future of information technology. This first post will focus on one of the deep problems that the Semantic Web solves.
[The Semantic Web will create] a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful.
— Sir Tim Berners-Lee (1998; The Semantic Web Roadmap)