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The Semantic Web is a mesh of data that are associated in such a way that they can easily be processed by machines instead of human operators. It can be conceived as an extended version of the existing World Wide Web, and it represents an effective means of data representation in the form of a globally linked database. By supporting the inclusion of semantic content in Web pages, the Semantic Web targets the conversion of the presently available Web of unstructured documents to a Web of information/data.
The term Semantic Web was coined by Tim Berners-Lee.
The Semantic Web is driven by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It builds on W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF), and is usually designed with syntaxes that use Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to represent data. These syntaxes are known as RDF syntaxes. The inclusion of data to RDF files enables computer programs or Web spiders to search, discover, collect, assess and process the data on the Web.
The key goal of the Semantic Web is to trigger the evolution of the existing Web to enable users to search, discover, share and join information with less effort. Humans can use the Web to execute multiple tasks, such as booking online tickets, searching for different information, using online dictionaries, etc. Even so, machines are not able to carry out any of these tasks without human intervention because Web pages are made to be read by humans, not machines. The Semantic Web can be considered a vision for the future in which data could be quickly interpreted by machines, allowing them to carry out numerous tedious tasks related to discovering, blending, and taking action on the information available on the Web.
The Semantic Web is a process that allows machines to quickly understand and react to complicated human requests subject to their meaning. This kind of understanding mandates that the appropriate information sources are semantically structured, which is a difficult task.