Web 3.0 describes the next evolution of the World Wide Web. The true definition of Web 3.0 has been unclear ever since it has been created. Some people refer to the semantic web as an equal to Web 3.0, others consider the semantic web part of Web 3.0. What does “the semantic web” mean though?

The way computers read data is very different of how we communicate. Let’s take a look at the sentence “Mike loves Kate”. The syntax of this sentence is the composition and structure of the sentence. The semantics indicate that Mike really likes Kate. If we change “loves” into a heart symbol, the syntax will change but the semantics will stay the same.

In the communication between computers the syntax has an important role. When you request a website to show up in your browser, you are actually doing a request to a web server. This server looks up your request and returns this in HTML format. Your browser reads the HTML syntax and translates this into a designed page. The meaning of what is on this page will stay unknown to the computer.

The same thing happens when we search for information on the internet. A search engine searches through billions of pages to find the keywords that you requested. It will then show you a list of pages that include the keywords you were looking for. The search engine knows which keywords are in these pages, but the real content of the pages remains unknown. This could be compared to learning a parrot a couple words, which it will replicate without knowing the actual meaning of the words.

Using this analogy, the current web can be considered as a “web of documents”. These documents are all linked to each other in one way or another, but for web applications the content of these documents is undefined. The content however is what is of interest to us.

The goal of the semantic web is to let computers understand the entities within these documents. When the semantic web is realized and successful, it will create a huge load of information exchange between organizations and individuals, producing a new level of findability and knowledge sharing.

So how exactly can we benefit from this? What does this mean for future marketing? Read our full and more detailed article on the power of the semantic web in our article section.

Let us know if you enjoyed reading this article. This is only our first article published, but expect a lot more to come during the upcoming two weeks. So don’t forget to come back tomorrow for a case study on social media marketing failures!