Semantic Web

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Description/Abstract

The Semantic Web is a proposed extension to the World Wide Web (WWW) that aims to provide a common framework for sharing and reusing data across applications. The most common interfaces to the World Wide Web present it as a Web of Documents, linked in various ways including hyperlinks. But from the data point of view, each document is a black box – the data are not given independently of their representation in the document. This reduces its power, and also (as most information needs to be extracted from documents by a human agent) inhibits the use of automatic information processing methods on the Web. The Semantic Web is an effort, steered by the World Wide Web Consortium, to develop a set of protocols, formalisms and standards to transform the Web into a Web of Data. Links would be between data, and data could be accessed independently of the applications that created them. This would allow both the sharing of data, and the amalgamation of data from different sources, using heterogeneous formats, in new contexts.