The WWW is about publication and browsing of texts with hyperlinks between them. The HTML pages contain also metadata, determining the layout of the text and allowing incorporation of images and further formatting. Still, the main content of the WWW is text that is understandable only for human beings.

The Semantic Web, also known as Web 3.0, offers content that is understandable by both humans and computers. The RDF standard allows for publishing and interlinking of structured data in the form of objects (more generally, resources) and links between them. This way one can publish facts like “Sofia is-part-of Bulgaria”, “Bulgaria is-a Parliamentary-Republic”, “1984th is-written-by George Orwell”, “Sirma has-office-in Sofia”, “Qashqai is-manufactured-by Nissan”, “Nissan number-of-employees 186336”. The meanings of the relationships are described in ontologies – schemata which allow computers to make simple inference, like “Sofia has-office-in Bulgaria”.

Up until few years ago, the Semantic web was just a theory. Today there are hundreds of sites which publish millions of facts of various natures. This lecture will present an index that contains about a billion of facts, including DBPedia (the structured version of Wikipedia), Geonames (a global geographical database), Wordnet (a semantic dictionary), and other data. There will be also a demonstration of a system, using this index as a neural network and modeling cognitive phenomena like priming on top of it.