51. SEMANTIC WEB-

♤ The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand.

♤ It is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database.

♤ The Semantic Web was thought up by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There is a dedicated team of people at the World Wide Web consortium (W3C ) working to improve, extend and standardize the system, and many languages, publications, tools and so on have already been developed. However, Semantic Web technologies are still very much in their infancies, and although the future of the project in general appears to be bright, there seems to be little consensus about the likely direction and characteristics of the early Semantic Web.

♤ 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. Scholars have explored the social potential of the semantic web in the business and health sectors, and for social networking. The original 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee described an expected evolution of the existing Web to a Semantic Web, but this has yet to happen. In 2006, Berners-Lee and colleagues stated that: "This simple idea... remains largely unrealized."