What is the Semantic Web?
The Semantic Web identifies content on the Web based on its meaning, providing intelligence from various data sources or actionable features from online Web applications. This is in contrast to “syntactic” markup, which only identifies the look and layout of content. Tim Berners-Lee’s, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is one of many champions of semantic web interaction as a consistent medium for the exchange of data, information, and knowledge (see the Information Confluence for the distinction). The Semantic Web relies on the markup of separate information fields to be understood by computers in order perform much of the perfunctory background operations involved in finding, sharing, and combining information from the Web to render as usable knowledge.
The Semantic Web continues to fall short of many of its highest ambitions to date, but is still supported by Tim Berners-Lee and World Wide Web Consortium (WWWC). Criticism about its practical feasibility, lagging progress, security and privacy, and need for additional markup has yet to be resolved. Regardless, many still see the semantic content as Web 3.0, the next evolution Web. It promises to provide intelligence and interaction for semantic publishing in scientific research, exposing experimental data as structured information for real-time sharing of information by researchers.
The Semantic Web is the only strategy proffered at this time to furnish intelligence and context across disparate Web information systems. Structured information based on context and meaning of information seems to be the only way to control Web data as it grows exponentially. Semantic publishing promises application interoperability and efficient, automated data integration.
One of the more realistic components of the Semantic Web is Linked Data, an environment that sees all entities on the Web as individual objects. These objects can then be intelligently combined and repurposed to create a new service, product, or knowledge set.