Semantic Web

Semantic Web, extension of the World Wide Web (WWW) in which data are given meaning (semantics) to enable computers to look up and “reason” in response to user searches. One of the strongest proponents of the Semantic Web is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the WWW and the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees standards for the project.

Berners-Lee had envisioned the Semantic Web by at least 1994, only a few years after he began developing the WWW in 1989. He unveiled his idea for the Semantic Web at the First International WWW Conference, held in 1994, which resulted in the formation of the W3C.

As Berners-Lee saw it, the two keys to developing a truly useful repository of information required the inclusion of metadata, or information about the information found on the Web, that could be read and “understood” by machines and the attachment of “values” to relationship hyperlinks that computers could use to direct searches.

Although adding metadata to Web pages has often been viewed as too labour intensive, the idea was embraced in 2008 by Yahoo! Inc., an American search engine company noted for its hierarchal retrieval structure.

Berners-Lee’s concept of the Semantic Web is in marked contrast to the advocates of Web 2.0, which he has strongly criticized. The Semantic Web may more properly be referred to as one development of Web 3.0, which includes further improvements in the “back-end” data infrastructure, especially data tags, to support natural language searches and data mining.