What is Semantic Web?

It is a set of standards that promote common data formats and exchange protocols on the Web. It allows the data to be shared and reused across applications, enterprise, and community borders being, therefore, regarded as the integrator across different content, information application, and systems.

The Semantic Web standards enable:

• solving the data silos problem that most private and public enterprises face nowadays.
• embedding semantic information into the documents making the originally human understandable content also machine-understandable.
• establishing common vocabularies (ontologies) and mappings between vocabularies and knowledge organisation systems. Doing so provides a harmonised common understanding across groups, enterprises, and communities of practice.
• building automatic agents to perform tasks using structured semantic data and metadata.
• establishing data-as-service to provide semantic information to agents. This means that the data can be accessed directly not only by the data-set.
• to take advantage of the value network effect adds to teh data

Within an organisation this set of technologies can be used for knowledge organisation. Among business applications are:

• facilitating the integration of information from different sources
• dissolving ambiguities in the corporate terminology
• facilitateing the conceptual interoperability at human and at machine levels
• improving the information retrieval
• identifying relevant information with respect to a given domain
• providing decision making support
• data storytelling and visualisation
• address data governance and management needs delivering trustworthy data

The semantic Web has made tremendous leaps in the last ten years maturing into a solid ecosystem of standards and technologies. More and more organisations publish linked open data, a movement that has grown massively every year, and continues to grow a volume of information that collectively is larger than any other single source. Large organisations such as NASA, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Amazon, European Institutions rely on semantic web technologies to run critical daily operations.