In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, wrote a Scientific American article, The Semantic Web, in which he outlined a vision of a web accessible to intelligent agents that would be able to consume, and act on, information stored in a machine readable form. The idea is that hypertext is very useful tot humans, but not so much to applications that lack the linguistic and cognitive abilities of human consumers of the web. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the web will understand the usefulness of linked data to human users. What is less obvious is how computer programs can assign meaning to data found on the web in a useful way. More generally, any application processing text (regardless of the…