Andrew A. Peterson and Ramping Up

We started with the semantics of document structure. That’s what the World Wide Web is made of. It’s a giant network of HTML pages linking to each other. HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) documents have titles, links, headings and other elements that allow us to see web pages the way we do today. The whole idea of a “Hyper-Text” is referring to the power of a form of semantics. It is a matter of semantics that we see <a>this</a> as a link and
<h2>

this

</h2>
as a heading. It is the semantics of document structure a.k.a, HTML that have made it possible for documents like this one to link to others and for all of these pages that make up the Web to be rendered by our computers in more or less the same way.

The Idea of “The Semantic Web” is really only necessary for the sake of comparison.

So to sort out the semantics of what we’re talking about when we use the word “semantic” with regard to the Web, The Semantic Web refers to a movement toward not just semantics that define the structure of documents or pages, but semantics being applied to how information is made available over the Net.

Recent trends in the Web’s growth are making computer-language standards for compartmentalizing domains of data. The Semantic Web is a movement toward not just using semantics for defining document structure, but using semantics to make declarations about the context in which a linked resource or bit of information can be useful.