Defining the semantic web

The growth of the internet has given rise to platforms like websites, portals, search engines, social media, and so on. All of these have created a massive collection of content and documents. Google and other search engines have helped to organize these documents and make them accessible to everyday users. So, today we are able to search our questions and select websites or pages that are linked to the answer. Even social media content is more and more accessible via search engines. You may find a tweet that you created two years back suddenly showing on a Google result. The problem of organization of web content is almost a solved problem. However, wouldn't it be more exciting if you asked a question on Google, Bing, or another search engine and it directly gave you the answer, just like a friend with the required knowledge? This is exactly what the future web would look like and would do. Already, for example, if you put the query on Google about what's the temperature in Paris? or who is the wife of Barack Obama?, it gives you the right answer. The ability of Google to do this is inherently semantic technology with natural language processing and machine learning. Algorithms that Google has behind its search engine creates links between queries and content by understanding relation between words, phrases, and actual answers.

However, today only a fixed number of questions can be answered, as there is big risk of inferring wrong answers on multiple questions. The future of the internet will be an extension to the World Wide Web, which is the semantic web. The term was coined by the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. The semantic web is a complex concept on a simple idea of connecting entities (URLs, pages, and content) on the web through relations, but the underlying implementation is difficult at scale, due to the sheer volume of entities present on the internet. New markup languages called Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) will be used to create these links between pages and content, based on relations. These new languages will allow creators of content to add meaning to their documents, which machines could process for reasoning or inference purposes, allowing automating many tasks on the web. Our book is not about explaining the underlying concepts of the semantic web, but just for your knowledge about where the web is heading and to appreciate the needs to mine the web more intelligently, as you'll learn in the later chapters.