The current World Wide Web (WWW) is, by its function, a syntactic Web where the structure of the content has been presented while the content itself is inaccessible to computers. Although the WWW has resulted in a revolution in information exchange among computer applications, it still cannot provide interoperation among various applications without some pre-existing, human-created agreements outside the Web. The next generation of the Web (the Semantic Web) aims to alleviate such problems and provide specific solutions targeting concrete problems. Web resources will be more readily accessible by both human and computers with the added semantic information in a machine-understandable and machine-processable fashion. The degree of formality employed in capturing these descriptions can be quite variable, ranging from natural language to logical formalisms, but increased formality and regularity clearly facilitate machine understanding.

The Semantic Web has the potential to significantly change our daily life due to the hidden intelligence provided for accessing services and large volumes of information. Nowadays, when a user wants to search some information on the Web, she receives a huge amount of irrelevant information and faces the task of going through all the results in order to identify what information is useful for her. Finding the cheapest version of a music CD, or finding a hotel in a given city with some price restrictions, implies surfing a big amount of Web sites. The Semantic Web, by adding explicit and machine-processable semantics, will bring the Web to a new level. Users will specify their needs in an explicit and machine-understandable manner. The hidden intelligence of the Semantic Web will help to provide only the results that are relevant to the user.

The Semantic Web will have a much higher impact on e-work and e-commerce than the current version of the Web. Explicit semantics will enable the automatic and dynamic location, composition and interoperation of Web Services, dramatically reducing the cost of e-work and e-commerce solutions and improving their flexibility.