The Semantic Web

I thought this was an interesting article about the “Semantic Web” – an initiative led by the creator of the current Web, Tim Berners-lee.

The goal of the Semantic Web initiative is to create a universal medium for the exchange of data where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. The Semantic Web is designed to smoothly interconnect personal information management, enterprise application integration, and the global sharing of commercial, scientific and cultural data. We are talking about data here, not human documents

The Semantic Web is not about the meaning of English documents. It’s not about marking up existing HTML documents to let a computer understand what they say. It’s not about the artificial intelligence areas of machine learning or natural language understanding -- they use the word semantics with a different meaning.

It is about the data which currently is in relational databases, XML documents, spreadsheets, and proprietary format data files, and all of which would be useful to have access to as one huge database.