5) What is the 'semantic web'?

The semantic web is a push by the World Wide Web consortium to standardise data and information in a universal format. By establishing these standards the semantic web aims to create a WWW that is understandable by computers on a similar level to that of human understanding. By improving computers understanding of information on the WWW it is hoped that they will be able to do more of the everyday tasks normally associated with human interaction. Examples of these include searching and combining of information. An example of this being the W3C group's "Scientific Publishing Task Force" which aims to revolutionise the way scientific research is performed by allowing the real time publishing of data online.