A distributed collection of "linked data" on the Web. Just as Web pages are linked together via hypertext, the goal of the Semantic Web is to ultimately link all the available public data.
Sometimes called "Web 3.0," the purpose of the Semantic Web is to make searches more effective. As information has grown exponentially on the Web, search engines routinely return countless result links when, very often, only one or two items of data are required to answer a query. Wading through the articles has turned people into research analysts whether they were ready for the task or not.
More Summaries Than Before
One cannot help but notice that results from search engines increasingly deliver a concise summary of facts about the subject of the query in addition to the Web page links. These summaries are derived from semantic-oriented knowledge bases.
URIs and RDF Models
The Semantic Web uses URIs to identify the data, the RDF data model to structure the relationships and numerous ontological vocabularies that provide the definitions. See
ontology,
URI,
RDF,
semantic browser and
semantic search.
Who's Developing the Semantic Web?
Knowledge bases structured with semantic meaning are continuously being developed by government and private industry as well as community driven. At some point, Google's knowledge base may wind up being the world's largest (see
Google Knowledge Vault). See
virtual assistant,
Wikidata,
Freebase and
DBpedia.