Digging into Semantic Web - Introduction

What is semantic web?

Your question is quite slim, but please don’t expect that I can give your answer in a slim way also. It will take time to make you understand what it is. In a nutshell, Semantic Web is the latest technological development in the domain of web.

The contemporary web has shown us the way through which remote machines could actually interconnect through distribution of documents (HTML files for say). The documents are supposed to be read by the humans only. Hence within the documents, the representation of data is structurally organized only. The entire semantic outcome or the meaning of the data inside that organized structure is left for human brain as it is sufficiently intelligent.

But since the inception of web, the time has changed. Web has got tremendous popularity both in business and social sectors.  Now – a – days, we think web is almighty, forgetting the fact that we, the humans only can mean out what is there in a webpage.

Let us think for the following scenario.

Suppose I ask you to come up with a book (among that are available in the internet) on “Leadership Management” with least number of pages. Is it a very ambitious demand? Primary it seems that this task is easy. But to get to the answer, you need to do a google (or any other) search, you got to go to the individual webpage, search for the data that represents the number of pages, then list them all and sort. What a pathetic process to answer a relatively “non-ambitious demand”.

Now realizing the problem, if you are clever enough, you will probably go for writing a web crawler (a computer program) that will do the job for you. But believe me, this is equally an inefficient way. Even if you get the google listing primarily, how your program will know, within a webpage, where is the data which represents the number of pages? You can search out for the data which represents the number of pages very easily, but your crawler/program is not that much intelligent.

So, we can come to a conclusion that today’s web is not fit for the machines/robots or computer programs to work on. It is has to be, because today’s web is for human only.

Hence we need a web which could be understood by the machines, because today the web has gone beyond the human usage. Current web has no organized framework which could actually mean out or semantically represent the data inside the webpage.

Finally, Semantic Web is that young technology, through which you can impart this semantic representations to the dumb webpage so that it could be understood by the machines. 

Here I end. Still if you have any doubts, please raise your voice; I will try to answer you.