“The Semantic Web” is actually a fairly old (in Internets years) term that basically refers to computers and computer programs accessing Web sites, instead of human eyeballs.

The long and the short of it is that with the Semantic Web, machines can extract data piecemeal from other machines, then bend, fold, spindle and mutilate it into a form that can be subsequently presented to human eyeballs.

Newsfeed aggregators are probably some of the oldest and best-known examples of the Semantic Web. These are sites that reach out to other sites through protocols like RSS, and get data in a machine-readable format. They then reformat this data into human-readable form, and slap it all together before presenting it to you with a pink bow tied around it.

RSS is supported natively by many sites. It is usually indicated by an orange icon that looks like this:

This tells you that, if you have an RSS reader, or you are operating a site that can read RSS from other sites, that a semantic interface is available to the site.

The BMLT Gets Semantic

Now, the BMLT also has the ability to allow other sites or programs to read the data it produces. It doesn’t use RSS. Instead, it specifies a simple way to load a Web page that will return machine-readable data.

In particular, you can send a URL to a BMLT server that will execute a tightly-focused custom search, and then return the results to you in the JSON format:

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)

This is a data format that is very popular with Web developers that use a lot of “active” technology, like JavaScript. It is fast, efficient, and easy to understand. It also meshes perfectly with JavaScript.

The BMLT tends to use JSON for most of its interactions with the BMLT satellites.

By using our BMLT Data Converter you can convert the JSON output to one of SON to CSV, XLSX, XML, KML, TOML or YAML. Basically, semantics give the BMLT truly awesome power. You can use these commands to extract pretty much any data that you can imagine (as long as the Server has it), in almost any format that you want. It’s a bit technical, but very cool.