The paper presents the vision of the Semantic Web, emphasizing ontologies and metadata as its building blocks. It discusses current research topics and promising application areas. The Semantic Web aims to make web content accessible and interpretable by machines, addressing the limitations of current web information that is primarily human-interpretable. The development of the Semantic Web involves several layers: providing a common syntax for machine-understandable statements, establishing common vocabularies, agreeing on a logical language, and using the language for exchanging proofs. Key components include Unicode/Unified Resource Identifiers (URIs), XML, RDF, ontologies, logic, proof, and trust. The paper also explores the role of ontologies in the Semantic Web, highlighting Description Logics (DLs) as a popular framework for defining web ontology languages. Various tools and methods for creating and maintaining ontologies are discussed, along with research areas such as databases, Web Mining, and application areas like Web Services, E-Learning, Peer-to-Peer networks, and Knowledge Management. The conclusion emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of the Semantic Web's development and its potential to enable new types of applications.The paper presents the vision of the Semantic Web, emphasizing ontologies and metadata as its building blocks. It discusses current research topics and promising application areas. The Semantic Web aims to make web content accessible and interpretable by machines, addressing the limitations of current web information that is primarily human-interpretable. The development of the Semantic Web involves several layers: providing a common syntax for machine-understandable statements, establishing common vocabularies, agreeing on a logical language, and using the language for exchanging proofs. Key components include Unicode/Unified Resource Identifiers (URIs), XML, RDF, ontologies, logic, proof, and trust. The paper also explores the role of ontologies in the Semantic Web, highlighting Description Logics (DLs) as a popular framework for defining web ontology languages. Various tools and methods for creating and maintaining ontologies are discussed, along with research areas such as databases, Web Mining, and application areas like Web Services, E-Learning, Peer-to-Peer networks, and Knowledge Management. The conclusion emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of the Semantic Web's development and its potential to enable new types of applications.