As a semantic web researcher and developer, my goal is to bring these technologies to the lay people. The main problem is the common chicken and egg dilemma, where the semantic web technologies need semantic data to become truly useful and powerful, but nobody wants to produce such data until they can see how powerful the semantic web is.

There is an immense amount of data available on the internet spread over millions of HTML pages, PDF documents, et cetera. These formats have been designed for making these documents understandable for people, but not for machines. In this instance RDF comes in as a language to describe data and relationships within the data. From a web of documents we evolve to a web of pieces of data, i.e. concepts, items, ideas, events, people, you name it. Each of them can be identified by their own Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and the web becomes a global database.