Semantic Web
It's not clear what the Semantic Web is, but then neither is it clear what the Web is. Roughly speaking, any document that is available on the Internet via an http: URI (or any other kind of URI understood by Web browsers) is "on the Web", and "the Web" consists of everything that is "on the Web" together with all available links between these documents.
Our take on the Semantic Web is as follows: The Semantic Web puts URIs in the role not of leading to documents but rather as denoting things - arbitrary things in the world, not just documents. For something to be "on the Semantic Web" is for it to be named by a URI for which there is documentation that tells someone encountering the URI what the URI names. The "Semantic Web" is then everything that is "on the Semantic Web" together with all available assertions (written in RDF, generally speaking) that semantically link these things. Such assertions include those that might live in documentation for a URI, but are certainly not limited to it, as defined URIs may be used in any kind of writing playing any role.
General information can be found in Wikipedia. A Semantic Web project with goals similar to those of the Neurocommons is Linking Open Data.
Workshop-Harnessing the Semantic Web for your Organization was conducted at BioIT World 2008. In Alan Ruttenberg's presentation he summarizes: The Semantic Web adds to Web standards and practices encouraging
- Unambiguous names for things, classes, and relationships
- Well organized and documented in ontologies
- With data expressed using uniform knowledge representation languages
- To enable computationally assisted exploitation of information
- That can be easily integrated from different sources
- Both within and across public and organizational boundaries
