What is Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is an idea of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee that the Web as a whole can be made more intelligent and perhaps even intuitive about how to serve a user's needs. Berners-Lee observes that although search engines index much of the Web's content, they have little ability to select the pages that a user really wants or needs. He foresees a number of ways in which developers and authors, singly or in collaborations, can use self-descriptions and other techniques so that context-understanding programs can selectively find what users want.

The Semantic Web proposes to help computers "read" and use the Web. The big idea is pretty simple -- metadata added to Web pages can make the existing World Wide Web machine readable. This won't bestow artificial intelligence or make computers self-aware, but it will give machines tools to find, exchange and, to a limited extent, interpret information. It's an extension of, not a replacement for, the World Wide Web.

That probably sounds a little abstract, and it is. While some sites are already using Semantic Web concepts, a lot of the necessary tools are still in development. In this article, we'll bring the concepts and tools behind the Semantic Web down to earth by applying them to a galaxy far, far away.