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Semantic Web Applications: Introduction
The Semantic Web: The Future of The Web
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The World Wide Web was the first step in the direction of connecting humans, computers, and documents to one another. The World Wide Web has grown a lot since its inception, and it's taken off in far greater success than anyone could have imagined or dreamed. But with this increase in data and information, and the people using it to enrich their lives, there is a dramatic need for a more intelligent web that can help people find the information they are looking for in the big mass of information that is out there. Google came along and made it easier for people to find information, but keyword extraction and keyword searching can only go so far.
The Semantic Web is the next step in the evolution of the web. The Semantic Web was a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The Semantic Web makes it easier for machines to understand what the documents are talking about. Contrary to popular opinion, there is no AI in Google. There is no fully-developed AI that can tell what a document is talking about like a human can. Machines can understand what documents are talking about more clearly with Semantics; semantics entail meta-data that is inserted into the document that helps the machine understand what the document is about. Semantics go beyond the keywords on the page.
The W3C is a shorthand acronym for the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C is an international standards organization for the World Wide Web. The W3C created a data format so that there would be a common framework to share data across applications, organizations, communities, websites, and enterprises. The data format is called Resource Description Framework, or RDF as an acronym. What it means to share data across applications is that applications usually keep information to themselves, and they don't interact with one another so it is hard to create meaning for different types of related data, for instance. Applications used to be designed to do just one thing, or handle one type of media, but the RDF idea makes it easy for applications to share data and help give context to content instead of having content trapped in applications. This new data format enables new vocabularies to be created that give meaning to data in ways that were never available before.
RDFa stands for Resource Description Framework - in attributes. RDFa enables attribute-level extensions to be added to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within web documents. The metadata can then be carried in an XML language. Finding, sharing, and combining information is easy with open linked data. One of the cruxes of this new technology is open linked data.
An RDF triple store is a database built for the special storing of RDF-rich metadata. An RDF triple store can store billions of triples.
If all of this information seems confusing to you, you're not alone. There are only a select number of companies that can effectively market your company with the semantic ideals outlined here. One of the premier companies for getting your business hooked into it so that it can be positioned primely for where the Internet is going, is Future Wave Designs. Future Wave Designs specializes in getting companies hooked into it so that you won't miss the boat and can get ahead of your competitors in the process. It's something that every company should take advantage of.