ABSTRACT
The term “Semantic Web” (SW) refers to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web of Linked Data (called also the Web of Data) as an extension of the conventional Web. In the time since the SW’s initial conception, the W3C SW Activity Group has accepted numerous Web technologies as standards or recommendations. However, in order to make the Web of Data a reality, and push large-scale integration of, and reasoning on, data on the Web, huge amounts of data must be made available in a standard format, reachable and manageable by SW tools. Therefore, the SW community has delivered a wide range of software frameworks that support the Linked Data life cycle including the extraction, storage, interlinking, enrichment, quality analysis, publishing, and exploitation phases. This entry gives an overview of the state-of-the-art SW knowledge representation mechanisms, SW tools, SW services technologies, SW application domains, as well as a projection of the future trends based on the current major open issues.
