The Semantic Web is what Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, really intended the Web to be—that is, a global graph of interlinked data. It is a generalization of a social graph, where you can use social data (with vocabularies like FOAF) as well as any other kind of machine-understandable data and connect them to each other. The standard formats for describing this infortmation to machines is the Resource Description Format (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). There's already a lot of encoded data on the Web, including an RDF version of Wikipedia, called DBPedia.
The Semantic Web will be different than today's Web in that computers as well as humans will understand what documents contain as well as what the significance of the links between documents are. This will facilitate automation of information-processing tasks, including researching information from trustworthy sources. The full SemWeb stack includes cryptography, proof systems, and trust networks.
