What is Semantic Web? 

The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages,the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of data".

It builds onthe W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF).

According to the W3C, "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries."

The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium ("W3C"), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards.

 He defines the Semantic Web as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines."

While its critics have questioned its feasibility, proponents argue that applications in industry, biology and human sciences research have already proven the validity of the original concept.



History

1. The concept of the Semantic Network Model was coined in the early sixties by the cognitive scientist Allan M.Collins, linguist M. Ross Quillian and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus in various as a form to represent semantically structured knowledge.

2. It extends the network of hyperlinked human-readable web pages by inserting machine-readable metadata about pages and how they are related to each other, enabling automated agents to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks on behalf of users. 
3.The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee,the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium ("W3C"),which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards. 

4. He defines the Semantic Web as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines."

Purpose

1. The main purpose of the Semantic Web is driving the evolution of the current Web by enabling users to find, share,and combine information more easily.

2. Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Irish word for "folder", reserving a library book, and searching for the lowest price for a DVD.

3. However, machines cannot accomplish all of these tasks without human direction, because web pages are designed to be read by people,not machines. Have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. 

4. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines.

5. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

6. Often the terms "semantics", "metadata", "ontologies" and "Semantic Web" are used inconsistently. 

7. In particular,these terms are used as everyday terminology by researchers and practitioners, spanning a vast landscape of different fields, technologies, concepts and application areas. 

Semantic Web solutions

The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data:

Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or airplane parts.

Web 3.0

Tim Berners-Lee has described the semantic web as a component of 'Web 3.0'. People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics –everything rippling and folding and looking misty on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource..."

"Semantic Web" is sometimes used as a synonym for "Web 3.0", though each term's definition varies.

Examples

When we talk about the Semantic Web, we speak about many "howto’s" which are often incomprehensible because the required notions of linguistics are very often ignored by most people. Thus, we rather imagine how emergence of the Semantic Web looks in the future.

Meta-Wiki

The sites of Wiki type 'soar' . Their administrations and their objectives can be very different. These wikis are more and more specialized. But most of wikis limit the search engines to index them because these search engines decrease the wikis' efficiency and record pages which are obsolete, by definition, outside the wiki (perpetual update).