The essential property of the World Wide Web is its universality.
The power of a hypertext link is that "anything can link to anything.
" Web technology, therefore, must not discriminate between the scribbled draft and the polished performance, between commercial and academic information, or among cultures, languages, media and so on.
Information varies along many axes.
One of these is the difference between information produced primarily for human consumption and that produced mainly for machines. At one end of the scale we have everything from the five-second TV commercial to poetry.
At the other end we have databases, programs and sensor output.
To date, the Web has developed most rapidly as a medium of documents for people rather than for data and information that can be processed automatically.
The Semantic Web aims to make up for this.