Semantic Web or Web of Data? A diachronic study (1999 to 2017) of the publications of Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium

Abstract

The web has been, in the last decades, the place where information retrieval achieved its maximum importance, given its ubiquity and the sheer volume of information. However, its exponential growth made the retrieval task increasingly hard, relying in its effectiveness on idiosyncratic and somewhat biased ranking algorithms. To deal with this problem, a “new” web, called the Semantic Web (SW), was proposed, bringing along concepts like “Web of Data” and “Linked Data,” although the definitions and connections among these concepts are often unclear. Based on a qualitative approach built over a literature review, a definition of SW is presented, discussing the related concepts sometimes used as synonyms. It concludes that the SW is a comprehensive and ambitious construct that includes the great purpose of making the web a global database. It also follows the specifications developed and/or associated with its operationalization and the necessary procedures for the connection of data in an open format on the web. The goals of this comprehensive SW are the union of two outcomes still tenuously connected: the virtually unlimited possibility of connections between data—the web domain—with the potentiality of the automated inference of “intelligent” systems—the semantic component.