The idea behind the semantic Web, very broadly, is that things on the Internet will be described with descriptor languages so that computers can

An object might be a marked as a car part or a person, for instance. If objects were thus identified, an enormous network of linked data would emerge and machines, with their vast processing speeds, could suggest surprising and useful links that the human mind could never come up with, posing the possibility of a new sort of artificial intelligence.

Since I can already feel the rising tide of negative comments as that version number graces the screen, bear with me for a second. Semantic web is just one of a few things often referred to as Web 3.0 -- others include topics like data portability or mobile web. But I think entrepreneur Nova Spivack offered the most useful definition by simply calling it the third decade of the web (2010 to 2020) and referring to the technology trends that will hit maturity during that time. Most importantly, the next generation of the web will bring us out of information overload and be more relevant and meaningful.

Semantic text analysis relies on synonyms and relationships between concepts, rather than rudimentary keyword scanning. Identifying sentiment is becoming invaluable for advertising on user-generated sites such as blogs, where you wouldn't want to place ads on a negative post.

Semantic technology is able to pull together connections between words and phrases. How often is concept "X" said in the same breath as concept "Y"? Measurement tools will be moving away from the tag cloud, and we'll be able to immerse ourselves in the trends of the real conversation, not just the keyword of the day.

Ontologies classifying and describing services are called service ontologies.

The existing conceptual models for describing services are OWL-S, WSMO, WSDL-S, SWSF, SAWSDL. Web services can be modeled in different tools like OWL-S Editor, OWL-S IDE, Protege, IRS-III, METEOR-S.

Like OWL-S, the other models also address the semantic nature of web service descriptions thereby making an effort to automate the web service life cycle.

The Semantic Web converts "display only" information to meaningful information by tagging it with descriptors like "phone number." Further, it allows users to find relationships between tagged information (like phone number and mailing address) using inference rules and data organizational tools called "ontologies" that provide logic and structure to the information embedded in web pages.

In one vision of a well-developed semantic web, a search returns a multimedia report rather than a list of hits. The report draws from many sources, including websites, articles, book chapters, blog dialogue, YouTube presentations, cell phone memory, virtual reality resources-anything that is accessible by the rules of Web 3.0. The information in the report - which may be very wiki-like in structure 3 - would be compared, collated and synthesized in a basic way, presenting points of agreement and disagreement, and perhaps evaluating these in light of political positions or contrasting research. The information would also be personalized, alerting us to personal and even local resources based on our profiles. Ideally, the Semantic Web reduces the amount of time we spend searching and sifting so that we can spend more time thinking and participating.

Will the Semantic Web fully arrive? Absolutely, not due to forces of digital determinism, but because of what MIT computer scientist Michael Dertouzos called "the ancient human in each of us." 4 As ancient human beings, we want to develop tools that help us connect, develop relationships, and explore and understand the world around us, regardless of how technologically advanced we become.

To date, the Semantic Web community has mostly been busy developing the technical infrastructure to make the Web of data feasible in principle and publishing linked data sets to make it a reality. If we’re to fully exploit the challenges and opportunities of a Web of data, we need to move beyond the initial phase and work to understand how this changes the Web’s user interaction paradigm.

In the Web of documents, individuals and organizations often take great care to develop visually attractive homepages that send out just the right message to their target audience. If RDF enables data from multiple sources to be easily integrated to form a coherent view of a particular thing, what does this mean for how we publish data on the Web? It means that the Web page as we know it is dead.

Key to developing Web of data browsers will be look-up services such as Sindice,7 which provide a means to find other RDF documents on the Semantic Web that mention a particular thing. This kind of service might help ensure that the user experience is coherent — that is, that it includes all data the user expects it to. However, ensuring that a particular view of data is useful is another issue.