The central idea of the Semantic Web is to extend the current human-readable web by encoding some of the semantics of resources in a machine-processable form. Moving beyond syntax opens the door to more advanced applications and functionality on the Web. Computers will be better able to search, process, integrate and present the content of these resources in a meaningful, intelligent manner.

The core technological building blocks are now in place and widely available: ontology languages, flexible storage and querying facilities, reasoning engines, etc. Standards and guidelines for best practice are being formulated and disseminated by the W3C.

The Semantic Web Challenge offers participants the chance to show the best of the Semantic Web. The Challenge thus serves several purposes:

• Helps us illustrate to society what the Semantic Web can provide
• Gives researchers an opportunity to showcase their work and compare it to others
• Stimulates current research to a higher final goal by showing the state-of-the-art every year