The Semantic Web has been specified by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C). It provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across applications, enterprises, and community boundaries. The Semantic Web is based on the resource description framework (RDF) that integrates a variety of applications using Extensible Markup Language (XML) for syntax and uniform resource identifiers (URIs) for naming.
The SPARQL query language is based on matching graph patterns. It can be used for getting information for resource description framework (RDF) graphs. The SPARQL query language for RDF has also been specified by the W3C. Other query languages for RDF are also known, such as SquishQL, RDQL, and Triple.
One application of RDF is the provision of so-called RSS-feeds. RSS is an XML application that conforms to the W3C's RDF specification and is extensible via XML-name space and/or RDF based modularization.
Further, clipping services are available on the Internet for finding recent news and for creation of user specific permanent story topics. “News Tracker” of the Excite Search engine is an example for such a clipping service.