Data and infrastructure
The semantic web is the project of a web in which data carry their meaning with them, so that machines too can understand them, link them and reason about them.
In the early web a page says ‘Rome’ and only the reader knows whether it means a city, a football team or a film; in the semantic web that word is labelled as a city, with its country, its population and its links to other data. The idea comes from the Briton Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web at CERN in Geneva, and who presented it in 2001 in Scientific American with James Hendler and the Finn Ora Lassila: it is a European root of the digital world. It rests on standards of the W3C consortium, such as RDF (describing a piece of data as subject, relation and object) and OWL (ontologies, the vocabularies that say how concepts relate). In 2011 Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, later Yandex, launched schema.org, the vocabulary that websites use today to describe products, people and articles to search engines: it is the form in which the semantic web entered everyday life, and the base that AI-generated answers feed on.
An example
A product page declares price, availability and average rating with schema.org: the search engine reads them as data and shows them directly in the results, with the stars.
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