Vuk Miličić, the author of Faviki, has written an article regarding the challenge of building a truly semantic web. Miličić writes, “The Semantic Web is often described as an extension of the current Web. The idea of what extending the Web should look like can be seen in Linked Data. In order to better understand the importance of Linked Data, one has to understand the context in which it emerged, i.e. the problem it has been trying to solve.”

He quotes Sir Tim Berners Lee, stating, “Many research and evaluation projects in the few years of the Semantic Web technologies produced ontologies, and significant data stores, but the data, if available at all, is buried in a zip archive somewhere, rather than being accessible on the web as linked data.” Miličić comments, “Put in this perspective, Linked Data did an important thing –  it required that data is actually put on the Web, and demanded that resolvable (HTTP) URIs are used as identifiers. It set the rules of how to use the existing Web technologies to publish and connect structured data on the Web. The data that extends the old Web is interconnected and itself form a new Web, often referred to as the Semantic Web or the Web of data.”

He adds, “Therefore, one can say that Linked Data paved the way for structured data to evolve into what really can be considered as some sort of a web. This web, the Web of data, is perhaps not so magnificent as once seen in the Semantic Web vision, but, for the first time, the Web part of the Semantic Web has started to take off.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Flickr/ anolobb