What is a good elevator pitch for Linked Data? - Semantic Overflow

The Semantic Web is The Web only with more data and information consumable by machines.

Imagine looking to buy "a yellow car". A search needs to know a page is about a car, that the car is still up for sale, that it is located not too far away. Such a search at the moment requires a lot of Googling or both the buyer and seller using an intermediary, such as a well known car trading Website.

Using hyperlinks for common terms on your Web pages as well as the text moves you up the ladder towards machine processing. A browser, spreadsheet, search engine, (whatever) can then make simple inferences to match "custard", "lemon", as all actually being "yellow".

The constant, virtuous feedback loop which built The Web may then drive agreements on terms, or at least mappings between common terms for your purposes which may enable you to further leaps of inference: "find me an automatic, yellow car" and have your agent discard the FooBar Model Z because they all had manual transmissions."

Ultimately The Semantic Web is a set of standards, tools, and techniques, working towards the vision of a uniform, distributed Data Web, using hyperlinks to generically express data terms and relationships, allowing searches, mashups and inferences which will lead to some powerful and more exciting unintended consequences than the current, beautiful, but human oriented Web of Documents."