The Semantic Web is based on Berners-Lee’s notion that “semantic” means “machine-processable” – it enables machines to understand the content on the Web. The CognitiveWeb is a cognitive and computational model of expert memory – it enables humans to reason about and address issues using a collaborative infrastructure. The CognitiveWeb shares much of the Semantic Web infrastructure (XML, semantic models, annotation systems, inference systems). At the same time, there are sharp differences, including a human-centric and fuzzy logic focus in contrast to the machine interchange of digitally signed proofs achieved through crisp logics.

The Semantic Web is a W3C activity. Information on the Semantic Web may be found at http://www.w3c.org. The CognitiveWeb is perhaps best viewed as complementary to, but not the same as, the Semantic Web.

There is a CognitiveWeb open source projects that provides a highly scalable RDF(S) backend for the Sesame framework based on the generic object model. This is also a wiki page for this project. Related projects are developing support for RDF Algebra (RAL) (project site, wiki page, mailing list) and a SPARQL RDF Query implementation (project site, wiki page).