The W3C's Semantic Web project has been described in many ways over the last few years: an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, a place where machines can analyze all the data on the Web, even a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful. The problem with descriptions this general, however, is that they don't answer the obvious question: What is the Semantic Web good for?
J. Martinez Lastra, and I. Delamer. Advances in Web Semantics I: Ontologies, Web Services and Applied Semantic Web, volume 4891 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin, (2009)