(17th-July-2020)
• The semantic web is a way to allow machine-interpretable knowledge to be distributed on the World Wide Web. Instead of just serving HTML pages that are meant to be read by humans, web sites will also provide information that can be used by computers.
• At the most basic level, XML (the Extensible Markup Language) provides a syntax designed to be machine readable, but which is possible for humans to read. It is a text-based language, where items are tagged in a hierarchical manner. The syntax for XML can be quite complicated, but at the simplest level, the scope of a tag is either in the form ⟨tag.../⟩, or in the form ⟨tag...⟩...⟨/tag⟩.
• A URI (a Uniform Resource Identifier) is used to uniquely identify a resource. A resource is anything that can be uniquely identified. A URI is a string that refers to a resource, such as a web page, a person, or a corporation. Often URIs use the syntax of web addresses.
• The Semantic Web is an extension of the Web through standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standards promote common data formats and exchange protocols on the Web, most fundamentally the Resource Description Framework (RDF).
• According to the W3C, "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries". The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee for a web of data that can be processed by machines. While its critics have questioned its feasibility, proponents argue that applications in industry, biology and human sciences research have already proven the validity of the original concept.
• The 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila described an expected evolution of the existing Web to a Semantic Web. In 2006, Berners-Lee and colleagues stated that: "This simple idea…remains largely unrealized". In 2013, more than four million Web domains contained Semantic Web markup.
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