Conclusion

• The World Wide Web affords unprecedented access to globally distributed information
• Metadata, or structured data about data, improves discovery of and access to such information
• RDF
  • is the W3C Recommandation defining an infrastructure that enables the encoding, exchange, and reuse of structured metadata
  • allows that vocabularies defined by different communities can be shared

Once the web has been sufficiently "populated" with rich metadata, what can we expect? First, searching on the web will become easier as search engines have more information available, and thus searching can be more focused. Doors will also be opened for automated software agents to roam the web, looking for information for us or transacting business on our behalf. The web of today, the vast unstructured mass of information, may in the future be transformed into something more manageable - and thus something far more useful.
(quoted from Ora Lassila)