The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by international standards body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standard promotes common data formats on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web, dominated by unstructured and semi-structured documents into a “web of data”. The Semantic Web stack builds on the W3C’s Resource Description Framework (RDF). According to the W3C, “The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries”. The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee for a web of data that can be processed by machines. While its critics have questioned its feasibility, proponents argue that applications in industry, biology and human sciences research have already proven the validity of the original concept. Scholars have explored the social potential of the semantic web in the business and health sectors, and for social networking. The original 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila described an expected evolution of the existing Web to a Semantic Web, but this has yet to happen. In 2006, Berners-Lee and colleagues stated that: “This simple idea…remains largely unrealized”.
