Week 10: Question 5

"What is the semantic web?"

The semantic web is a theory of how the Internet could be designed and run in the future. This theory rotates around the idea that all information on the internet has it's semantic meaning defined. The idea is that it makes the web more "intelligent" when a user is searching/using a program to find information so that there is more relvancy and usefullness to what they find.

For example a web site about car mechanics will have the semantic meanings of learning, referencing, skills and hobbys. This means when someone is trying to find information about learning a mechanical procedure they will find pages which have a semantic meaning of learning that are related to mechanics. This is opposed to how the internet functions today where a user searching for "car mechanics" will find every page on the internet that features the phrase "car mechanics" and they will have to manually filter out all the pages not related to what they are looking for until they find the relevant information.

Tim Berners-Lee originally coined this theory in an article in Scientific American, May 2001. However it must be pointed out that in a more recent article by himself he stated that "This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized."