Web pages are designed so people can read them, nobody could predict that the web would evolve into a position into which web applications would need to read each other. The purpose of the semantic web is to come up with the means so web applications know how to talk to each other and work in an unattended fashion.

The simplest definition I have found to date was buried into Wikipedia's entry:

"Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for "monkey", reserving a library book, and searching for a low price on a DVD. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web."

In php and any other web development framework, you use this kind of arrangement whenever your application automatically searches and fetches things for you, unattended, in an automatic fashion. An example:

You have a wordpress blog, with a plugin to display a RSS feed in a box. Instead of simply putting somebody else's RSS feed into the box's address, you go to Google, do a complex search, then use the feature that allows you to convert a search criteria into an RSS feed.

This means that your RSS feed-in-a-box is doing a lot more work, it is scouring the web looking for items that match your criteria, instead of relying on somebody posting to some other site and its results showing in the RSS feed for that site.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web


Permalink | Report