The next steps for the WWW: putting meaning into the Web
Paul Warren · Computing & Control Engineering Journal · 2003
The World Wide Web today suffers from a defect that stems from its original design. The Web is based on the use of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which allows a page's author to define broadly how it will look on computers across the globe. HTML works well in providing a common language to achieve that goal. However, it says nothing about what the data is for, i.e. about its semantics. The effectiveness of the World Wide Web is set to be dramatically changed with the introduction of the semantic Web.