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Today people may talk about the World Wide Web, Web 2.0 or the  Semantic Web. There are a lot of misconceptions about their similarities and differences, and also where the technologies inherent to each overlap, if they overlap at all.  The biggest misconception is that the terms Semantic Web and Web 2.0 mean the same thing.

What is the Semantic Web?

Where Web 2.0 is focused on people, the Semantic Web is focused on machines. The Web requires a human operator, using computer systems to perform the tasks required to find, search and aggregate its information. It's impossible for a computer to do these tasks without human guidance because Web pages are specifically designed for human readers. The Semantic Web is a project that aims to change that by presenting Web page data in such a way that it is understood by computers, enabling machines to do the searching, aggregating and combining of the Web's information — without a human operator.

It has taken years to put the pieces together that comprise the Semantic Web, including the standardization of RDF, the W3C release of the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and standardization on SPARQL, which adds querying capabilities to RDF. So with standards and languages in place, we can see Semantic Web technologies being used by early adopters.

Semantic Web technologies are popular in in areas such as research and life sciences where it can help researchers by aggregating data on different medicines and illnesses that have multiple names in different parts of the world.  On the Web, Twine is offering a knowledge networking application has been built with Semantic Web technologies. The Joost online television service also uses Semantic technology on the backend. Here Semantic technology is used to help Joost users understand the relationships between pieces of content, enabling them to find the types of content they want most. oracle offers a Semantic Web view of its Oracle Technology Network, called the OTN Semantic Web to name a few of those companies who are implementing Semantic Web technologies.