The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to "understand" and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. At its core, the semantic web comprises a set of design principle. collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies.

Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that are yet to be implemented or realized. Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications. Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge .

The key components of semantic web technology are as follows:

1. OWL: The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium. They are characterized by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web. OWL has attracted both academic, medical and commercial interest.

2. Resource Description Format: The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax formats.

3. RDF Schema: RDF Schema (various abbreviated as RDFS, RDF(S), RDF-S, or RDF/S) is an extensible knowledge representation language, providing basic elements for the description of ontologies, otherwise called Resource Description Framework (RDF) vocabularies, intended to structure RDF resources.

4. Microformat: A microformat (sometimes abbreviated μF) is a web-based approach to semantic markup that seeks to re-use existing HTML/XHTML tags to convey metadata and other attributes, in web pages and other contexts that support (X)HTML, such as RSS. This approach allows information intended for end-users .

In the Semantic Web data itself becomes part of the Web and is able to be processed independently of application, platform, or domain. This is in contrast to the World Wide Web as we know it today, which contains virtually boundless information in the form of documents. We can use computers to search for these documents, but they still have to be read and interpreted by humans before any useful information can be extrapolated. Computers can present you with information but can’t understand what the information is well enough to display the data that is most relevant in a given circumstance. The Semantic Web, on the other hand, is about having data as well as documents on the Web so that machines can process, transform, assemble, and even act on the data in useful ways.