Abstract
In this chapter, we first introduce the foundations upon which the current Web is built: HTTP, URLs and HTML. We discuss how the current Web was designed with human readability, rather than machine readability, in mind. In particular, much of the information presented in HTML webpages is encoded in natural language, which is poorly machine readable. We present concrete examples to illustrate why it is difficult to automate tasks over the content of the current Web. We argue that in order to enable greater levels of automation on the Web, we need content to be made available in formats that are more machine readable, motivating the need for a Web of Data.
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Hogan, A. (2020). Introduction. In: The Web of Data. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51580-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51580-5_1
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-030-51580-5
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