In the previous recipe, we talked about RDF and SPARQL without sketching the broader context in which these technologies were created, so let's introduce them now. Around the year 2000, web researchers and engineers were noticing that humans were no longer the only consumers of the Web; more and more machine clients, and thus pieces of software, started using the Web for various purposes. However, every such piece of software had to be hardcoded for a particular task, and they could not parse the natural language in documents on the human Web. Therefore, a vision called the Semantic Web was coined, a Web in which information would also be interpretable for machines. This was the start of RDF and SPARQL.
However, the vision was rather abstract and difficult to many people. Several of the concepts relied on concepts such as ontologies and reasoning, which can become very complex rapidly. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web and one of the creators of...