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.
Like the Internet, the Semantic Web will be as decentralized as possible. Such Web-like systems generate a lot of excitement at every level, from
major corporation to individual user, and provide benefits that are hard or impossible to predict in advance. Decentralization requires
compromises: the Web had to throw away the ideal of total consistency of all of its interconnections, ushering in the infamous message "Error 404:
Not Found" but allowing unchecked exponential growth.