How Open Source Is Advancing the Semantic Web

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The Semantic Web, a term coined by World Wide Web (WWW) inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, refers to the concept that all the information in all the websites on the internet should be able to interoperate and communicate. That vision, of a web of knowledge that supplies information to anyone who wants it, is continuing to emerge and grow.

In the first generation of the WWW, Web 1.0, most people were consumers of content, and if you had a web presence it was comprised of a series of static pages conveyed in HTML. Websites had guest books and HTML forms, powered by Perl and other server-side scripting languages, that people could fill out. While HTML provides structure and syntax to the web, it doesn’t provide meaning; therefore Web 1.0 couldn’t inject meaning into the vast resources of the WWW.

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