What distinguishes the Semantic Web from the traditional web?

The Semantic Web distinguishes itself from the traditional web by its ability to understand and interpret the content of web pages.

The traditional web, as we know it, is designed for human consumption. While it's easy for humans to understand the content and context of web pages, it's not the same for computers. The traditional web is essentially a collection of documents and links where the meaning of information is implicit and understood by human users, but not by machines. This means that the vast amount of information available on the web is largely inaccessible to automated processing and integration.

The Semantic Web, on the other hand, is an extension of the traditional web, designed to enable computers to understand and interpret the content and context of web pages. It's about making the web readable by machines as well as by humans, thereby creating a more intelligent and intuitive web. The Semantic Web is based on the idea of adding metadata and semantic tags to web pages, which makes the meaning of information explicit and understandable by machines. This allows for more sophisticated and precise search capabilities, automated data integration, content personalisation, and much more.

The Semantic Web uses a set of technologies and standards, such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and SPARQL, which provide a framework for expressing information in a machine-readable way. RDF is used to represent information in a graph format, OWL is used to define vocabularies and relationships between terms, and SPARQL is a query language for retrieving and manipulating data stored in RDF format.

In essence, the Semantic Web is about creating a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines. It's about turning the web into a kind of global database or knowledge base, where information is linked and structured in a way that can be easily understood and used by computers. This has the potential to revolutionise the way we find, share and combine information on the web.