The data web, like the document web involves standards as HTML, Cascading Style Sheets and so on, all this things were enabled by royalty free standards. The same on the data web.

What if you wanted to meet a friend for coffee at the best café next to her house?

Well, even if you had your friend’s address on Gmail, tagged the best cafés in the City in del.icio.us and made your GPS position available to an online web service, there’s no way you could get the right café straight away as technology stands right now.

All the information needed to find the perfect coffee is available online and available but not very usable. You could still pull it off after a few clicks and searches on your internet enabled mobile device but this is not the point.

The cool thing would be that some algorithm (AI?) cross-referenced the data and produced the right answer at the right moment and this is where the Semantic Web or Intelligent Web comes to rescue.

Think of what you could achieve by cross-referencing air-traffic information and nutrition patterns when triying to stop the spreading of a disease.

Learn all about it in this excellent Tim Berners-Lee video.

All about the Semantic Web in this 2006 article by Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee (PDF)

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