In December 2011 (by the way, Happy New Year!) I presented a set of slides containing multiple, overlapping, vague and sometimes discording definitions of “Semantic Web” given by very authoritative people in the community. Of course, it is not an easy task to make a clear and unambiguous description of what the Semantic Web is and how it is related to “The Web”.
Recently, I came back to that question and tried to address it through a model commonly used for describing bibliographic resources: FRBR. From this analysis, I came out with my own personal view or, let me say, (yet another) definition of “Semantic Web”, shown in the following picture:
In short, the general idea is that all the “webs” we often refer to – i.e. the Traditional Web, the Social Web and the Semantic Web – actually identify different historical landmarks of the evolution of The Web. Thus, the Semantic Web is the current state of The Web and includes all the scientific fields, researches, theories, communities, tools and technologies that have been part of The Web since its birth.
In a sentence: the Semantic Web is the (today’s) Web.
Pretty picture, Silvio!