The Semantic Web: A Network of Understanding

If you visit my Web page, which is not much different than most other people’s in many ways, you would find many fields which are highlighted as links to other pages. In the list of my students you can find links to their pages, in the links of my papers you can find downloadable files or links to various digital libraries, and in the lists of my classes you can find links both to the Web resources I used in my classes and to University pages that describe when the classes were given, what the prerequisites were, etc. In short, a great deal of the information “on my page” is not actually on my page at all, it is provided by the linking mechanisms of the Web. It is, in fact, exactly this network effect in which I can gain advantage by linking to information created by other people, rather than recreating it myself, that makes the Web so powerful.