A road map for the future, an architectural plan untested by anything except thought experiments.

This was written as part of a requested road map for future Web design, from a level of 20,000ft. It was spun off from an Architectural overview for an area which required more elaboration than that overview could afford.

Necessarily, from 20,000 feet, large things seem to get a small mention. It is architecture, then, in the sense of how things hopefully will fit together. So we should recognize that while it might be slowly changing, this is also a living document.

This document is a plan for achieving a set of connected applications for data on the Web in such a way as to form a consistent logical web of data (semantic web).


Introduction
The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web. Leaving aside the artificial intelligence problem of training machines to behave like people, the Semantic Web approach instead develops languages for expressing information in a machine processable form.

This document gives a road map - a sequence for the incremental introduction of technology to take us, step by step, from the Web of today to a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful.

It follows the note on the architecture of the Web, which defines existing design decisions and principles for what has been accomplished to date.

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html