The Semantic Web is a Web with a meaning. This is another step of World Wide Web that enables people to share information beyond the boundaries of applications and websites. Semantic Web is a way of describing things understandable by both Computer and Human.

"If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database"

Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999
 

This will make our work easier by giving the right information as needed and will save the time in search. Main concern in this approach is to make it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.

 
As of now we are accepting whatever the information given for our query in World Wide Web and looking for a suitable answer in it. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. But this will changed with Semantic Web. Web has a capability of understanding and giving the right information for users. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.

 
The Semantic Web describes the relationship between things not about links between web pages.

The difference between World Wide Web and Semantic Web is, currently the World Wide Web is based mainly on documents written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for example Metadata tags,

<meta name="keywords" content="computing, computer studies, computer">
<meta name="description" content="Cheap widgets for sale">
<meta name="author" content="Billy Bob McThreeteeth">

The Semantic Web takes the concept further, it involves publishing the data in a language, Resource Description Framework (RDF), specifically for data, so that it can be categorized as human perception and be "understood" by computers. RDF is a markup language for describing information and resources on the web this will help computer to pick, search information from the web. Intelligent web applications could useful to collect information from many different sources, combine information, and present it to users in a meaningful way.

Semantic vs. non-Semantic Web

Example tags that would be used in Non-semantic web page (Web 1.0 and Web 2.0):

<item>cat</item>

A tag that would be used by Semantic web 'page'(part of Web 3.0):

<item rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Cat">Cat</item>

To use the semantic web, we will need "Semantic Web Agents" or "Semantic Web Services". These "Agents" or "Services" will help us to find what we are looking for on the semantic web.