The Syntactic and the Semantic Web

Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of the evolution of the Web. Initially, Web pages were intended only for human consumption and were usually displayed on a Web browser. New Internet business models, such as B2B and B2C, required organizations to search for solutions to enable a deep interoperability and integration between their systems and applications. One emergent solution was to define the information on the Web using semantics and ontologies in a way that it could be used by computers not only for display purposes, but also for interoperability and integration. The research community developed standards to semantically describe Web information such as the resource description framework and the Web Ontology Language. Ontologies can assist in communication between human beings, achieve interoperability among software systems, and improve the design and the quality of software systems. These evolving Semantic Web technologies are already being used to build semantic Web based systems such as semantic Web services, semantic integration of tourism information sources, and semantic digital libraries to the development of bioinformatics ontologies.