Semantic Web Comes

The widespread use of internet technologies has created a wave of innovations and interactions leading to a major impact in almost every areas of human activities, albeit a large number of these applications were not foreseen thirty years ago, when the Internet architecture was developed. Besides, in only 14 years the World Wide Web became the greatest network accessible repository of human knowledge. It contains around 3 billion documents, which are accessed by over 500 million world-wide users. Moreover, the Internet is continuing to evolve to integrate other technologies such as multimedia and mobile technologies. On the other hand, information overload and poor aggregation of contents make the current Web inadequate for automatic transfers of information. As a consequence, the current Web is evolving for a new generation called Semantic Web, in which data and services are understandable and usable not only by humans but also by computers. "Moreover, the Semantic Web may further evolve to a Sentient Web, which is a further new generation of Web with capabilities for sentience. As a consequence, new technologies and concepts are being developed and new ways of utilizing or integrating older and new technologies are being constantly developed." [1]


[1] Mário Freire and Manuela Pereira, Eds., The introduction in: "Encyclopedia of Internet Technologies and Applications", Department of Informatics, University of Beira Interior, Portugal