The Semantic Web aims to improve the limitations of HTML by using XML and other technologies to provide more detailed information. It links data to centralized points and is already in use through Creative Commons licenses. The future looks promising with more sites integrating semantic components.
The Semantic Web is an ongoing project, currently led by the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. It attempts to address some of the semantic shortcomings of the current web by introducing much more versatile and dynamic markup into the documents that make up the web.
HTML, the markup language used for most of the World Wide Web, has a very limited set of tags that can be used to tell a parser what the text inside those tags should be. For the most part, the tags used in HTML are used for various layout and stylistic instructions, with the goal of focusing HTML solely on structural markup, and cascading style sheets address style issues. There are some exceptions to this, such as header tags (title, meta, etc.) and embedded object tags.
The semantic web, however, uses XML (as well as other technologies, such as OWL and RDF), to provide information of essentially unlimited detail. Some of Lee’s ideas for this include the ability to embed link information within the links themselves: adding metadata to each link indicating the web page title, perhaps a rating, the nature of the relationship between the two people they make the connection and an assortment of other informative tidbits.
A key aspect of the Semantic Web is linking data to centralized data points, rather than defining them independently. For example, currently, if I wanted my text to appear all red, I would specify: font color=red, or perhaps use a style sheet to specify: p { color: red; }. With the semantic web I would point to something like: font color=www.wisegeek.com/colors/red/, and the color would then be fetched from a central point.
The semantic web is building and spreading under the structure of the existing web. Anyone who has seen a Creative Commons license has seen the semantic web in action: copyrights themselves are held in a central database where they are stored, and in turn websites using a Creative Commons license link to that database entry, rather than simply replicating the license themselves. If you examine the markup of a web page using one of these licenses, you will see a series of tags hidden from normal view, intended to allow search engine crawlers, news feeders and other automated tools to actually understand the copyright you entered on your site.
Ultimately, the future of the semantic web looks bright. With more and more sites integrating small semantic components, such as copyright information, meta keywords, creator names and global coordinates, it would seem like an idea simply too good to fail.
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