“The Semantic Web is the extension of the World Wide Web that enables people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications and websites. It has been described in rather different ways: as a utopic vision, as a web of data, or merely as a natural paradigm shift in our daily use of the Web.”
In short, the Semantic Web is nothing less than a web with all your information organised so that not only human beings can understand it, but also machines. The machines will help us in tasks that we do manually. I guess one way to put it is, it makes everyone’s life easier!
It is not about a new network of information, but a project to apply intelligent concepts in today’s internet. Each piece of information comes with a well-defined meaning and is no longer loose in the sea of content, which allows for better interaction with the user. New search engines, innovative interfaces and intelligent content organisation are just some examples of improvement. This way you will not need to mine the internet for what you seek, it will now behave as a whole, and not as a bunch of stacked information.
This means that each item of website information should be made clear by tags that denote what it really means. An E-comerce site, for example, must make clear to the machines where this item is related to the product name, where the page is, as well as the price, the description and other relevant information that the page displays about the product.
In the example below, we have a page of a book with information organised by semantics which, in this case, uses the standard http://schema.org/. Content is smart and makes it clear to the searchers that all items are related to the book.
1) <div itemscope itemtype=“http://schema.org/Book” >
2) <h3 itemprop=”name”>A Developer’s Guide to the Semantic Web</h3>
3) <div summary=”Bibliographic Details”> Main Author: <div itemprop=”author”>Yu, Liyang</div></div>
4) Price: <div itemprop=”price” content=”76.99″>$76.99</div>
5) <div itemprop=”availability” href=“http://schema.org/InStock”>In Stock</div>
6) <div itemprop=”isbn”>0316769487</div></div>
At line 1 “itemscope” informs that this is a semantic area, and itemtype, said that in this case the information is of a book.
At line 2, itemprop=name, means that there is the name of the book, “A Developer’s Guide to the Semantic Web”.
At line 3, Bibliographic Details, and a item property author, who is Liyang Yu.
At line 4, item property is a price.
At line 5, reports that there is a stock for this book
At line 6, the ISBN number this book.