A decade after invention of World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee is promoting "Semantic Web". The Internet hitherto is a repository of digital content. It has a rudimentary inventory system and very crude data location services. As a sad result, most of content is invisible and inaccessible. Moreover, Internet manipulates strings of symbols, not logical or semantic propositions. In other words, Net compares values but does not know meaning of values it thus manipulates. It is unable to interpret strings, to infer new facts, to deduce, induce, derive, or otherwise comprehend what it is doing. In short, it does not understand language. Run an ambiguous term by any search engine and these shortcomings become painfully evident. This lack of understanding of semantic foundations of its raw material (data, information) prevent applications and databases from sharing resources and feeding each other. The Internet is discrete, not continuous. It resembles an archipelago, with users hopping from island to island in a frantic search for relevancy.

Even visionaries like Berners-Lee do not contemplate an "intelligent Web". They are simply proposing to let users, content creators, and web developers assign descriptive meta-tags ("name of hotel") to fields, or to strings of symbols ("Hilton"). These meta-tags (arranged in semantic and relational "ontologies" - lists of metatags, their meanings and how they relate to each other) will be read by various applications and allow them to process associated strings of symbols correctly (place word "Hilton" in your address book under "hotels"). This will make information retrieval more efficient and reliable and information retrieved is bound to be more relevant and amenable to higher level processing (statistics, development of heuristic rules, etc.). The shift is from HTML (whose tags are concerned with visual appearances and content indexing) to languages such as DARPA Agent Markup Language, OIL (Ontology Inference Layer or Ontology Interchange Language), or even XML (whose tags are concerned with content taxonomy, document structure, and semantics). This would bring Internet closer to classic library card catalogue.

Even in its current, pre-semantic, hyperlink-dependent, phase, Internet brings to mind Richard Dawkins' seminal work "The Selfish Gene" (OUP, 1976). This would be doubly true for Semantic Web.

Dawkins suggested to generalize principle of natural selection to a law of survival of stable. "A stable thing is a collection of atoms which is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name". He then proceeded to describe emergence of "Replicators" - molecules which created copies of themselves. The Replicators that survived in competition for scarce raw materials were characterized by high longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity. Replicators (now known as "genes") constructed "survival machines" (organisms) to shield them from vagaries of an ever-harsher environment.