Introduction The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way, that it can be used by machines - not just for display purposes, but for using it in various applications.
Examples are: E-commerce requires much richer data. Retailers require this data to flow from wholesalers and wholesalers requires data to flow from producers. Data-exchange of this kind is currently very limited, consisting of tab-delimited dumps or product-specific tables. Specific XML formats for each exchange task improves the situation, but ones misses the network effect of being able to share 90% of the processing software, because the XML data model is too low-level.