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20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

This document is designed as being a simple but comprehensive introductory publication for anybody trying to get into the Semantic Web: from beginners through to long time hackers. Recommended pre-reading: the Semantic Web in Breadth.

Ah… the semantic web. The saviour of the internet, and the evil empire enforcing its evil standardization upon my freedom. I've always been a little suspicious of this particular topic. Not that I'm opposed to any kind of stardardization, railroads and the lack of standardizations with bank cards at grocery stores come to mind (grrr…) But the semantic web and how data is 'linked' is pretty important to analytics. time to dive in.

Last week ReadWriteWeb asked: "Is Linked Data Gaining Acceptance?" Our answer: definitely yes. Projects like DBPedia, a community effort to structure the information from Wikipedia and provide it as Linked Open Data, have come a long way and work really well. For example, you can search for all scientists born in Zürich, Switzerland.

The father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines."

And I'm saying the semantic web won't work. Can't work.

Presentation slides from the January 25 session with Dragan Gasevic

A short introduction to the semantic web

The comments to the video are also interesting.

SDArch - Semantic Document Architecture is our atempt to bring the vision of the Semantic Web to desktop office-like documents. SDArch aims at enabling desktop document data to be efficiently discovered, linked and shared across application, enterprise and community boundaries. It introduces 'semantic documents' as completely open and queryable resources, containing data which is uniquely identified, semantically annotated and understandable by both humans and software agents.

Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods.

DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

Shared by Sheila MacNeill during Jan 25 web conference with Dragan Gasevic -- short briefing paper on the Sematic Web, linked and open data from JISC CETIS (PDF)