We have been talking about the Semantic Web for 17 years or so. Certain groups have already gone through the hype cycle while the rest of the world has barely even heard of it. Confusion is rampant about what it is and what it will bring, but the prevailing sentiment is that it is not here yet.

Or is it?

While the full vision of what will grow out of the underlying technologies will take decades to come to fruition, there are already some concrete examples of how they can be used today.  This tutorial will be a gentle but real introduction to the benefits of:

- REST
- RDF
- SPARQL
- RDFa
- OWL
- Linked Data

These represent the work horse technologies of the Semantic Web stack. They allow us to model, share and integrate our data from just about any source. They allow us to reason about arbitrary domains and connect information in documents, databases and service-oriented architectures. We can connect publicly available information to privately held content. We can help the major search engines learn about what we offer and bring customers and curious parties to us

This is not about some future Web. This is about our current Web and how we can make it more useful and powerful today. This tutorial will involve lots of running code but will also provide context for the efforts. We will use both commercial and open source tools.