Research has been undertaken into how to apply the work of Tim Berners-Lee and others in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (2006b), (Berners-Lee, 1999). In order to represent information it is necessary to use Meta-languages. The use of standards for sharing information and resources is core to research into the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web involves making the Web into a repository of knowledge, which can be catalogued and searched intelligently. Software agents could then undertake this search task. Berners-Lee and colleagues have envisaged the Semantic Web as a global database with the information held in a structured form where content is separated from formatting (Berners-Lee et al 2001) and (Berners-Lee, 2002). To achieve this, the structure is created using XML Meta-tags, and a stylesheet provides formatting. Stylesheets are also defined using XML. The Semantic Web should make information more understandable by machines and by humans. This can help people, and intelligent agents find the information they need.
The Grid and Semantic Web areas of research are converging. The ideas and technology behind the Grid are explained in (Foster et al, 2001a) and (Foster et al, 2001b). Universities are involved in Grid-computing research, Southampton (De Roure et al 2001a) and (De Roure et al, 2001b), Exeter, Liverpool John Moores (Alan et al, 2003) and (Naylor et al, 2003). Semantic Web and Grid researchers have recently become involved in the Semantic Grid. The Semantic Grid involves sharing of computer resources as well as information, and does not just apply to high performance computing applications. Semantic languages and ontologies can be part of a larger effort to provide a Grid of information and applications, which can be requested as required. If a user requests the answer to a problem using one computer, this can then get the help of others to solve it. Machine intelligence does not then reside in one machine but in the complex system of interacting machines.