The current World Wide Web (WWW) is, by its function, a syntactic
Web where the structure of the content has been presented while
the content itself is inaccessible to computers. Although the
WWW has resulted in a revolution in information exchange
among computer applications, it still cannot provide interoperation
among various applications without some pre-existing, human-created
agreements outside the Web. The next generation of the Web (the
Semantic Web) aims to alleviate such problems and provide specific
solutions targeting concrete problems. Web resources will be more
readily accessible by both human and computers with the added
semantic information in a machine-understandable and machine-processable
fashion. The degree of formality employed in capturing these descriptions
can be quite variable, ranging from natural language to logical formalisms,
but increased formality and regularity clearly facilitate machine
understanding.
The Semantic Web has the potential to significantly change our daily
life due to the hidden intelligence provided for accessing services
and large volumes of information. Nowadays, when a user wants to search
some information on the Web, she receives a huge amount of irrelevant
information and faces the task of going through all the results
in order to identify what information is useful for her. Finding the
cheapest version of a music CD, or finding a hotel in a given city with
some price restrictions, implies surfing a big amount of Web sites. The
Semantic Web, by adding explicit and machine-processable semantics, will
bring the Web to a new level. Users will specify their needs in an explicit
and machine-understandable manner. The hidden intelligence of the
Semantic Web will help to provide only the results that are relevant
to the user.
The Semantic Web will have a much higher impact on e-work and e-commerce
than the current version of the Web. Explicit semantics will enable the
automatic and dynamic location, composition and interoperation of Web
Services, dramatically reducing the cost of e-work and e-commerce
solutions and improving their flexibility.
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