Technology Assessment
and Planning

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is about programmatically extending the capabilities of the traditional web. Web content has been and continues to be primarily content presented for human consumption. Semantic Web concepts are aimed at making web content meaningful programmatically, which in turn leads to more efficient use of web resources for human users.

Several XML-based technologies are key to enabling machine understanding of web content: ontologies that define sets of things and their relationships within conceptual realms, and RDFs (resource description frameworks) that describe particular things and their attributes. The challenge is to have web content tagged with meta-data, and not just presentation mark-up such as HTML, so that the content can be meaningfully consumed by computers and not just users who use content visually.

The technologies associated with making Web content machine usable, and thereby more easily discorvered, searched and served to other systems, make possible some of the things envisioned for next-generation Web concepts, such as Web 2.0.

• The Semantic Web, Scientitific American, 2001. Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila
• Semantic Web activity, W3C
• Knowledge Management and the Semantic Web: From Scenario to Technology. IEEE Intelligent Systems (02/06) Vol. 21, No. 1, P. 53; Warren, Paul