Humans often use the internet to carry out everyday activites, such as purchasing numerous items or researching various topics. However, a computer is not able to complete the same tasks, due to the fact the language of web pages can only be understood by people, and not a computer. The whole principle of a Semantic Web is to make computers understand web pages the same as humans. This therefore allows boring and tedious tasks to be completed by the computer and not the human, obviously allowing more time for the user to be more productive with applications they enjoy. Sir Tim Burners-Lee defines a Semantic Web as a Web 3.0 aspect that will make the World Wide Web better.

Now, lets put all of this information into a practical example. Say you've got you're bank statements online, along with some photographs and appointments in a calendar. Wouldn't it be great to have your photos embedded into a calendar so you could recognise when they were captured, along with important bank statements attached also? Well, at the moment, that isn't possible. It's simply because each element is stored within it's own stand alone application or server, where it's kept to itself. This collaboration of data would be made possible by a web of data from a Semantic Web.

"I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize." Sir Tim Burners-Lee (1999)

Metadata is an important element that makes web pages more relevant, and therefore helps benefit the proposals of a Semantic Web. Accurate metadata is all well and good, and beneficial to internet users, but Metacrap is a problematic issue.

Metacrap is when metadata is not used with care, and was defined by Cory Doctorow in 2001 as the seven insurmountable obstacles to reliable metadata:

• People lie (obstacle #1)
• People are lazy (obstacle #2)
• People are stupid (obstacle #3)
• Mission Impossible: know thyself (obstacle #4)
• Schemas aren't neutral (obstacle #5)
• Metrics influence results (obstacle #6)
• There's more than one way to describe something (obstacle #7)

Therefore, a semantic web requires a massive collaboration between a vast array of internet users, organisations and companies. Web 2.0 was a drastic step up from Web 1.0, and Web 3.0 looks set to be another massive leap forward.

Click here to view the University of Bedfordshire Wiki article about the Semantic Web.