Semantic publishing on the Web, or semantic web publishing, refers to publishing information on the web as documents accompanied by semantic markup. Semantic publication provides a way for computers to understand the structure and even the meaning of the published information, making information search and data integration more efficient.
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Although semantic publishing is not specific to the Web, it has been driven by the rising of the semantic web. In the semantic web, published information is accompanied by metadata describing the information, providing a "semantic" context.
Although semantic publishing has the potential to change the face of web publishing, acceptance depends on the emergence of compelling applications. Web sites can already be built with all contents in both HTML format and semantic format. RSS1.0, uses RDF (a semantic web standard) format, although it has become less popular than RSS2.0 and Atom.
Semantic publishing has the potential to revolutionize scientific publishing. Tim Berners-Lee predicted in 2001 that the semantic web "will likely profoundly change the very nature of how scientific knowledge is produced and shared, in ways that we can now barely imagine". Revisiting the semantic web in 2006, he and his colleagues believed the semantic web "could bring about a revolution in how, for example, scientific content is managed throughout its life cycle". Researchers could directly self-publish their experiment data in "semantic" format on the web. Semantic search engines could then make these data widely available. The W3C interest group in healthcare and life sciences is exploring this idea.