Semantic Web: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

Ever since the vision was formulated, the Semantic Web has inspired many generations of innovations. Semantic technologies have been used to share vast amounts of information on the Web, enhance them with semantics to give them meaning, and enable inference and reasoning on them. Throughout the years, semantic technologies, and in particular knowledge graphs, have been used in search engines, data integration, enterprise settings, and machine learning. In this paper, we recap the classical concepts and foundations of the Semantic Web as well as modern and recent concepts and applications, building upon these foundations. The classical topics we cover include knowledge representation, creating and validating knowledge on the Web, reasoning and linking, and distributed querying. We enhance this classical view of the so-called "Semantic Web Layer Cake" with an update of recent concepts that include provenance, security and trust, as well as a discussion of practical impacts from industry-led contributions. We conclude with an outlook on the future directions of the Semantic Web. This is a living document. If you like to contribute, please contact the first author and visit: https://github.com/ascherp/semantic-web-primer