Semantics in Wiki - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 241

The W3C has developed a set of standards and tools to support this vision, and
after several years of research and development, these are now usable and could
make a significant impact. Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in
which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and
people to work in cooperation [ 11 ].
While Web 2.0 focuses on people , the Semantic Web is focused on machines .
The Web requires a human operator, using computer systems to perform the tasks
required to find, search and aggregate its information. It is impossible for a computer
to perform these tasks without human guidance because Web pages are specifically
designed for human readers. The Semantic Web is a project that aims to change this
by presenting Web page data in such a way that it is understood by computers,
enabling machines to do the searching, aggregating and combining of the Web's
information - without a human operator.
The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integra-
tion and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, whereas the original Web
concentrated mainly on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for
recording how the data relates to real-world objects. This allows a person, or a
machine, to start off in one database and then move through an unending set of
databases which are connected not by wires, but by common subject matter [ 12 ].
The Semantic Web is an extension to the Web that adds new data and metadata
to existing Web documents, extending those documents into data. This extension of
Web documents to data is what will enable the Web to be processed automatically
by machines and also manually by humans.
The Semantic Web is typically built on syntaxes that use URIs to represent data,
usually in triples-based structures: i.e. many triples of URI data that can be held in
databases or interchanged on the World Wide Web using a set of particular syntaxes
developed especially for the task. These syntaxes are called “Resource Description
Framework” (RDF) syntaxes. The RDF is used to turn basic Web data into
structured data that software can make use of. RDF works on Web pages and also
inside applications and databases .
Data are accessed using the general Web architecture using, for example, URIs.
Data should be related to one another just as documents (or portions of documents)
are already. This also requires the creation of a common framework that allows data
to be shared and reused across application, enterprise and community boundaries,
and to be processed automatically by tools, as well as manually, including revealing
possible new relationships among pieces of data.
A variety of applications can be used in Semantic Web technologies. These
include: data integration , whereby data in various locations and various formats
can be integrated in one, seamless application; resource discovery and classifica-
tion to provide better, domain-specific search engine capabilities; cataloguing for
describing the content and content relationships available at a particular Website,
page or digital library; use by intelligent software agents to facilitate knowledge
sharing and exchange; content rating ; description of collections of pages that
represent a single logical “document”; description of intellectual property rights
of Web pages.