Semantic Web

The semantic web , also referred to as Web 3.0, is all about the data. The next generation of the web will fulfill Tim Berners-Lee original vision for a web of meaning. Shifting from the web of text that humans read and interpret to a web of linked data that machines can read and interpret. The concept is based on creating vocabularies or ontologies for describing data and then allowing the data to be linked from multiple sources and accessed as if it were a single local resource. Early work has been conducted in the health and life sciences fields, allowing published research data to be shared in uniform fashion across organizations and around the world.

Linked Data is published on the web usingRDF within XML. The metadata is defined in Ontologies. Ontologies are developed using tools like OWL. The data is represented using a series of triples, subject, predicate and object. Two ontologies in wide spread use for some time now are FOAF from the Friend of a Friend Project and Dublin Core from the Dublin Core Meta Data Initiative.

• DBpedia

• EKOSS - Engineering/Environmental Knowledge Ontology-based Semantic Search

• Freebase - Open Database of the Worlds's Information

• GetGlue - Semantic Social Networking

• Hakia - Semantic Search

• HealthBase

• SearchMonkey - Yahoo Developer's Network

• This We Know - US Government Data

• Twine - Social Bookmarking

• Wolfram|Alpha - Computational Knowledge Engine

• CubicWeb

• Metatomix

• NetBase

• Ontotext

• OpenCalais

• TopQuadrant

• Tim Berners-Lee

• CSS

• HTML

• Microformats | hCard | hCalendar | hReview

• OWL

• RDF

• RDFa

• SPARQL

• Wolfram Alpha

• XML