Semantic web
The semantic web is a network of information linked together in a way that is easily processable by computers, on a global scale. One can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the Internet, or as a globally linked database.
The semantic web was envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and hypertext protocol and markup language (HTTP and HTML). Semantic web technologies and communities are still in infancy, 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.
Semantic web can be seen as an enormous information engineering solution. As it becomes easier to publish data in a repurposable form, more people will want to pubish data, and there may be a "domino effect". MyWikiBiz is just one semantic web application that can be used for a variety of different tasks, increasing the modularity of applications on the Web.
The semantic web is generally built on syntaxes which use Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) to represent data, usually in "triples" based structures. For example, one might use three URI statements to describe that George Orwell - is the author of - 1984. One might then go on to use three URIs to say that 1984 - was published in - 1949. That is, unlimited triples of URI data can be held in databases or exchanged on the World Wide Web using a set of particular syntaxes developed especially for the task. These syntaxes are called "Resource Description Framework" (RDF) syntaxes.
Here is an example of an RDF framework for a compact disc of music:
<rdf:Description
- rdf:about="http://www.recshop.fake/cd/Empire Burlesque">
- <cd:artist>Bob Dylan</cd:artist>
- <cd:country>USA</cd:country>
- <cd:company>Columbia</cd:company>
- <cd:price>10.90</cd:price>
- <cd:year>1985</cd:year>
</rdf:Description>
Semantic web on MyWikiBiz
The MyWikiBiz website operates a version of software called Semantic Mediawiki. For more information on how to construct URIs in the proper RDF for this venue, visit Help:Semantic tagging.
