Weaving Meaning: the W3C's Semantic Web Initatives

The Semantic Web is an evolution of the World Wide Web designed to support machine readable data as well as human readable material. The semantic web defines set of standardized representations for data (XML/RDF) and for the conceptual structures behind that data (RDF Schema, Web Ontology) to support a variety of new metadata applications. Technologies based on standards may be used to improve searching, navigation and management of content, data integration from disparate systems, discovery and composition of web services and facilitate software agents. This presentation will provide an overview of W3C's Semantic Web Activity as well as a discussion of the supporting technologies. A practical demonstration of these technologies for organizing and navigating distributed museum information on the web will also be provided.