The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international organization that works to develop Web standards, suggests a simple definition for the Semantic Web (https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data, retrieved April 2016):
"The Semantic Web is a Web of Data"
Both, the term Semantic Web and this definition, were coined by the inventor of the Web himself, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee), who is also the director of the W3C. When he talks about his greatest invention, he often stresses its social implications and how the Web is more a social creation than a technical one (Weaving the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, 1999).
The vision of the Web as a social platform becomes even clearer if we briefly analyze its evolution. One of the keywords (or buzzwords) that became popular in the first decade of the millennium is Web 2.0, coined in the late 1990s, but later popularized by Tim O'Reilly. The term suggests a new version of the Web, but it doesn't refer...