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.
