What is the Semantic Web?

I've been hearing the term Web3 and Semantic Web around the traps and thought I would investigate a little further. The following is a quote from an interview with Ivan Herman who is a member of the International World Wide Web3 Conference Committee.

The shortest way is to say it is a data Web. Now, that by itself doesn’t say too much. But if you look at the Web as of today, it’s sort of a Web of documents. People put up documents in HTML or generated from a database or whatever that are linked together and humans look at it. In this sense, it’s a bunch of documents that are on the Web. But in fact, there’s a huge amount of data, and you would like to have the data relate to one another directly. So, you have big databases, and the databases together represent knowledge and information, not necessarily individually, and you want the same kind of linkage among the data the way you do it with documents. In this sense, it’s the Web of data. You also find people calling it the data Web—more or less the same thing. The Semantic Web technologies, the various things that we do, are all the building blocks to realize that properly.

I love this quote:

Ivan Herman says the Semantic Web will lead to “mash-ups on steroids”. As the World Wide Web Consortium’s Semantic Web activity lead, Herman has a lot of influence on the development of Web 3.0 technologies. The computer scientist has coordinated all of the standards body’s work on the Semantic Web since 2006.

Full Interview here.

I found this information using Twine