Semantic publishing on the Web or semantic web publishing refers to publishing information as data objects using a semantic web language or as documents with explicit semantic markups. Semantic publication is intended for computers to understand the structure and even the meaning of the published information, making information search and data integration more efficient.

Although semantic publishing is not specific to the Web, it has been driven by the rising of the semantic web – a web of data. In order to make the semantic web work and realize its potentials, information must be presented (i.e. published) in semantic format on the web.Therefore, as the semantic web is further developed and adopted, semantic publishing will become a main form of web publishing.

Semantic publishing is expected to change the face of web publishing. When this will happen depends on when killer applications will emerge. The present technologies are capable to build web site with all contents in both HTML format and semantic format. Examples are mindswap, UMBC ebiquity, and web2express.org open lab. However, semantic web site is not common yet. Earlier version of news feed, specifically RSS1.0, is in RDF (a semantic web standard) format, although it has become less popular than RSS2.0 and Atom feed. A new attempt from web2express.org is trying to apply RDF standard more broadly to various data feeds. Anyone can use the new free online service (ufeed) to create and provide RDF data resources and datafeeds for products, news, events, jobs and studies.

Semantic publishing will also revolutionize scientific publishing. Tim Berners-Lee predicted in 2001 that the semantic web “will likely profoundly change the very nature of how scientific knowledge is produced and shared, in ways that we can now barely imagine” . Revisiting the semantic web in 2006, he and his colleagues believed the semantic web “could bring about a revolution in how, for example, scientific content is managed throughout its life cycle” . One simple idea that may radically change scientific communication is for researchers to directly self-publish their experiment data in semantic format on the web. In one scenario, a scientist could design and run an experiment, and share the experiment information with the world in real time by publishing the data as a semantic object on the web. Semantic search engines will make these semantic data available at everyone's finger tips. W3C interest group in healthcare and life sciences is exploring this idea of self-publishing of experiment now, for which a demo is available.

Two different approaches to semantic publishing

Publish information as data objects using semantic web languages like RDF and OWL. Ontology is typically developed for specific information domain, which is then used to formally represent the data in such domain. Semantic publishing of more general information like product information, news, and job openings uses so-called shallow ontology, as exemplified by the free Ufeed online tool. The W3C SWEO Linking Open Data Project maintains a list of data sources that follow this approach as well as a list of Semantic Publishing Tools

Embed formal metadata in documents using new markup languages like RDFa and Microformats.

Instances of ontologies and vocabularies for publishing

Dublin Core

SKOS

FOAF

SIOC

RSS

DOAP

SPE

Instances of free or open source tools and services

Semantic MediaWiki software: A single solution for semantic annotation that fits the needs of most Wikimedia projects and still meets the Wiki-specific requirements of usability and performance.

Swoogle: A search engine for ontologies and instance data on the Web.

Ufeed: A free online tool for publishing data resources and data feeds in RDF, including product information, news, events, jobs and studies.

D2R Server: Tool for publishing relational databases on the Semantic Web as Linked Data and SPARQL endpoints.

BigBlogZoo: 60,000 xml sources are regularly crawled and articles are reaggregated under a Semantic URL. Articles are categorized using the DMOZ RDF classification schema.