If you've been lurking around any technology forums, or you just plain live and breath the stuff, chances are you will have come across the term "Semantic Web." ?

Maybe you've even attempted to get a handle on the whole thing, and started throwing around terms like, RDF, Core Metadata, and all sorts of artificial intelligence concepts. Or, perhaps like me, you stumbled across some of the resources on the web, only to find you can't make much sense of something that you think might just be really, really important.

Well, let's see if we can get a handle on this... without making it overly complex.

To put it simply... the Internet is on the verge of another revolution. The development of the World Wide Web made the Internet accessible to millions by making it easy for anyone to publish and access documents on the Internet. However, the explosive growth of the Web has led to the problem of information overload.

Because of this, researchers from industry and academia are now exploring the possibility of creating a "Semantic Web," ? in which the "human" ? meaning of web pages is made visible to computers, allowing machines to process and integrate Web resources intelligently.

Beyond improving quick and accurate web searches, this amazing technology may also allow the development of intelligent Internet agents and help promote communication between a wide array of web-enabled devices.

The Semantic Web will help to bring much needed "structure" ? to all that valuable content on the Web, making sure that software "agents" ? can go from webpage to webpage, with the swift grace of a human Internet user.

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but simply an extension of the current one, where webpages are given well-defined meaning, making it possible for computers and people to work together more effectively.

The first steps involving the development of the Semantic Web into the current structure of the existing Web are already well advanced. Very soon, the Semantic Web will provide a whole new level of functional tools, as computers and software becomes better able to "understand" ? all the content currently available on the Web.

This is really significant, because up until now, the Web was developed as a medium for sharing content between people. The Semantic Web will allow for a huge amount of such content to be "processed" ? by computer agents, and software.

Plus, the Semantic Web will make this possible very quickly.

For the Semantic Web to grow at full speed ahead, computers must have a structure, and set of rules for making sense of all that data.

The biggest challenge facing the Semantic Web then, is to provide a language that represents meaning and logic. No simple feat to be sure. The two most important technologies for developing the Semantic Web are already in use by many web developers: eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). In short, XML allows web developers to add the "structure" ? to their documents but says nothing about what the structures mean. Meaning is then expressed by RDF.