The best explanation is an example. Try googling for all cars advertised on the Internet with engines of less than 2.0 liters that run unleaded and have an mp3 connection and can be seen in the showroom conveniently accessible by public transport from my home.
Google simply will not be able to help you with this request, and not really. You have to do a few searches and correlate the results yourself. On the Semantic web, you can express interest in products for sale, which are cars, and add restrictions. Each result would be helpful. One or more user interfaces may allow you to do this, some may be specialized and others may be universal.
Another example, which creates a diagram of things that are not usually stored in one place, speaks of the popularity of diet coke or country walks in a population compared to levels of clinical obesity in the same population. For this you can’t use a web browser at all, but you can use something similar to Excel - but the semantic network provides you with tools (SPARQL, RDF) for searching and processing the data that is there and accessible via HTTP.
So, the point made by Bravax is not entirely true, not much can change - you can just get more useful and better mashup websites. Or you can find yourself a lot of things that you never thought of as a connection to the network until today.
There are many alternatives on the current network for doing the same thing, for example, Animated GIF, Flash, Silverlight, DHTML, etc. A variety of tools and formats will be presented to place data on the semantic network. RDFa is a good, more general type of microformat, but you can dump the entire database, set the SPARQL endpoint , use microformat or a proprietary HTML structure and add a transform , there will be many tools for different cases.
So, Vartec is also partially right, you can use RDFa and eRDF, but you can also use many other things to publish data.
Note that there are many overlaps between the semantic network and another simper concept called Linked Data . How they relate to each other is unclear, but my perception of this is that the Linked Data website is what you need before the Semantic Web tools and methods have something to do. Related data refers to data, a semantic network is more about data processing, reasoning about it and solving problems such as trust reliability, etc. In fact, the bottom few layers of the technology stack .