Semantic Web to Website Promotion

The Semantic Web and Its Importance to Website Promotion
By Peter E

The Semantic Web is meant to be the successor to the web we all use and love today. Its architect is no other than the creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee. The idea behind the Semantic Web is making it easy for machines to understand a site’s content. Web development languages today, i.e., HTML, are designed for making content easily readable by people. It is very hard for software agents to extract the semantics (or meaning) of a website since no such information can be encoded by webmasters using HTML or any other popular web development technology used today.

The new web will require a whole new set of technologies that will allow webmasters to specify the meaning of a website’s content. These technologies are Extensible HTML (XML), Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to name the most important ones. Every object will have a unique identifier or URI and as such an agent could uniquely refer to it. The RDF will allow developers to specify the relationships between different objects. RDF models are currently specified using XML syntax. Lastly, OWL will allow developers to create even more complex relationships among objects and also define ontologies and mappings among them so that all agents can essentially talk the same language using the same vocabulary.