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What should be the role of marketing in the semantic web? Should there be any? According to the W3C, the semantic web is about common data formats that make it easy to integrate and combine data from diverse sources. It's about mapping ideas expressed in human language to data in a way that facilitates automatic processing, where software can programmatically comprehend how different pieces of data are related. It's a web behind the web of animated banner ads and branded UI designs.

This structure of URLs is one element of a problem called internationalization. The internet evolved (or was intelligently designed for those not down with the Darwin ;-p) in a way that made TLDs (Top Level Domains like .com, .info, or .org) almost completely useless for determining the intent of a website. (The exception to this is regulated TLDs like .gov, .edu and some country specific TLDs) In theory, a .com is supposed to only be used by companies and .org by nonprofit organizations. Obviously, this does not happen. Combine this with the current trend to misuse country specific TLDs (ccTLDs) for shorter domains names (Hint: Bit.ly has nothing to do with Libya) and you can easily see why the semantic value of TLDs has became a relatively poor metric for categorizing websites.