Chapter 11. The evolving Web
This chapter covers
- Linked Data and the evolving Web—current state
- Linked Data and the evolving Web—future directions
In our closing chapter, we’ll survey the current state of the Semantic Web and the role of Linked Data. We’ll identify interesting applications of Linked Data. We’ll attempt to predict the direction the Semantic Web and Linked Data will take and look at some emerging applications.
Many people assume that the evolving Web of Data is synonymous with the Semantic Web. That’s a bit misleading. The original World Wide Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee had semantic hyperlinks. In other words, each hyperlink had meaning. One hyperlink might lead to information about the author of a web page, and another might lead to a description of a particular service. But that’s not how the Web evolved. For most of its two decades of existence, hyperlinks on the Web were without any particular meaning. The best that we could say about them was that they meant “look over here.”