Tim Berners-Lee's current proposal for enhancing the WWW, the Semantic Web initiative defines a set of standards that augment the current WWW standards. The aim of making is to make the Web more useful for humans by making it more understandable for machines.
The W3C says:
The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the Web defined and linked in a way that it can be used
by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various
applications. In order to make this vision a reality for the Web, supporting standards, technologies and policies must be designed to enable machines to make more sense of the Web, with the result of making the Web more useful for humans. Facilities and technologies to put machine-understandable data on the Web are rapidly becoming a high priority for many communities. For the Web to scale, programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people.
The
emphasis, as you can see is on
shared open data models.
The Semantic Web Activity (W3C calls "activity" large coordination efforts) uses standards and concepts developed in the W3C Metadata Activity (PICS, DSig, the P3P privacy standard and the CC/PP device capability description standard).
Additionally, extra effort is dedicated to RDF related standards (notice that RDF is expressed in XML).
What will it do for me?
If the Semantic Web becomes a reality, we will be able to add real-world, machine-readable information to Web pages in a portable format.
For example, a student Web page might "say", in a standardized way, that he studies at Purdue; advanced search engines could use the information to answer questions such as "Find all the people named Mary Brown that study but do not work at Purdue".
Moreover, the RDF related standards will allow intelligent search engines to draw inferences like "an acceptable mailing address for Mary Brown is the mailing address of the Department she studies at"; at the same time, the much talked about software "agents" will at least have usable information to grind.
A good place to start reading about the Semantic Web is http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Activity.
W3C allows quoting of its documents provided the following is included: Copyright © 2001 W3C® (MIT, INRIA, Keio) All Rights Reserved. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/