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From Information to Knowledge


The goals of the Semantic Web are to add interrelations and meaning to documents and data, enabling distributed systems that assist humans in
organizing, discovery, sharing and reasoning about data.


Semantics refers to aspects of meaning, as expressed in language or other systems of signs. Semanticists generally recognize two sorts of meaning that an expression  may have: (i) the relation that the expression, broken down into its parts, has to things and situations in the physical world, and (ii) the relation the signs have to other signs, such as the sorts of mental signs that are conceived of as concepts.

The very purpose of the Semantic Web is to let one interconnect related information. The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. The basic assumption is that the value and usefulness of information increases the more it has meaning and it is interlinked with other information elements.

The Semantic Web is a framework that defines a means for creating expressions of the form “Subject, Predicate, Object” or “triples,” in a machine-readable format, where each of Subject and Predicate is a URI and Object is either URI or a value. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF). URIs present real-word objects and their representations on the web, abstract concepts and their instances, and symbols.

In his book, Weaving the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee described his dream for the Web:

I have a dream for the Web . . . and it has two parts.

In the first part, the Web becomes a much more powerful means for collaboration between people. I have always imagined the information space as something to which everyone has immediate and intuitive access, and not just to browse, but to create. [...] Furthermore, the dream of people-to-people communication through shared knowledge must be possible for groups of all sizes, interacting electronically with as much ease as they do now in person.

In the second part of the dream, collaborations extend to computers. Machines become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web - the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. 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, leaving humans to provide the inspiration and intuition. The intelligent "agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize. This machine-understandable Web will come about through the implementation of a series of technical advancements and social agreements that are now beginning (and which I describe in the next chapter.)

For further reading: