Raw

The semantic web is: a webby way to link data. That is all.

Everything beyond that is entirely optional fluff: data vs metadata, syntaxes, ontologies, query languages, rules, logic, ...

- Dave Beckett

But...

There's more to the semantic web than just the technology.

- Shelley Powers

How to square this? Dadaist allegory : cephalopod doorknobs

Coincidentally I just saw an answer to another definition point that's been bugging me recently. A lot of folks still only see RDF as a metadata technology, which is understandable since that is a strength that was highlighted early on. But metadata is just one kind of data, RDF is useful for virtually any data. So what do you call non-meta data? Yue Pan of IBM China, in his intro to SWEO uses a phrase that'll do: " master data".