How does the Semantic Web Work?

Integration of the huge amount of data accessible on the Web is one of the major challenges of the coming years. The goal of the Semantic Web is to provide a set of technologies to achieve this type of integration, i.e., to be able to develop applications that can quickly and reliably mash up different datasets, and do that based on standard technologies as opposed to ad-hoc and site specific approaches.

This presentation uses a very simple (and, of course, a bit artificial...) example from the book publication world to show how the goal of data integration can be achieved using Semantic Web technologies. Without going into technical details, the roles of a unified data format (i.e., RDF), of vocabularies, and of queries are presented. The goal is not to give a thorough description of any particular technology but rather to give a feel of what the Semantic Web technologies aim to achieve and how, and to generate further discussions.