An introduction to Semantic Web Browser

The RDF data published on the web is highly interconnected and heterogeneous and often needs specialized knowledge in order to be discovered and retrieved. By simplifying the task of finding and extracting the relevant structured data about entities, Semantic Web Browser makes it easy for everyone to navigate and explore the Semantic Web in all its splendor and glory.

About the Semantic Web

On the Semantic Web, all entities are assigned persistent URIs (or more broadly, IRIs) and the information about these entities is expressed in the form of RDF statements that link these entities to each other.

The RDF statements constitute linked datasets that are made available in different ways by different publishers. For example, some data providers serialize RDF graphs using Turtle and make them available as static documents, while others embed RDF content into HTML documents using the JSON-LD format.

The role of Semantic Web Browser

Semantic Web Browser is an online tool for querying and browsing the Semantic Web. A type of hyperdata browser, it allows users to navigate the Linked Data published on the web and retrieve the information about specific resources by their URIs.

Given the URI of an entity, Semantic Web Browser dereferences the URI using the linked data standards and protocols and returns the structured data about the underlying entity. If the URI can be interpreted as a URL of a "browseable" HTML page, any RDF content embedded into this page is also used as the source of information about the entity.

How to use Semantic Web Browser

To start browsing the Semantic Web, enter a URI into the search box and press Enter. The relevant results are then returned and include the information about this resource on the Semantic Web (labeled "Exact match") and/or the structured data embedded into the web page located at the URL you provided.

You can move from resource to resource by clicking on URIs in the search results.