Web & Semantic Web

The Web (World Wide Web)

• The World Wide Web  is a web of documents; A global repository of linked documents (with HTML hyper-links acting as the glue).
• Documents that are well presented for humans to glean information from.
• One can navigate the web, hopping from one document to another transparently irrespective of which computer the documents are stored on.
• Web is a realization of “It isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting”.
• The World Wide Web is Document centric.

The Semantic Web

• The Semantic Web is a web of data; A Web scale database (RDF defining the structure of data)
• Data that is structured enough  to be processed by machines/software-agents (which in-turn may provide information of better quality for human consumption)
• Graphs of data which can be processed to infer non explicit knowledge.
• Semantic Web is a realization of “It isn’t the Documents but the things they are about that are interesting”
• The Semantic web is Data centric.