Since its inception, the Web has been a major goal of research for information management, which has been studied primarily using classical paradigms. However, since the early 2000s, we are witnessing drastic changes in the area of ​​web data management. If we were to summarize it in one sentence, it would be: actual distribution of large volumes of data .

In this new scenario, it captures the meaning of heterogeneous data and the development of tools for processing play a crucial role. The Semantic Web is a huge initiative led by the World Wide Web Consortium , whose main objective is to achieve these goals, thus transforming the Web stream of documents into a data network, where human users and Computer applications can take better advantage of the massive amount of information stored in it. Some key steps have been taken to achieve these goals. However, we are still far from having techniques that take full advantage of the semantics and logic behind Web data, once their structure, scale and distribution - altogether - are considered As a full-fledged phenomenon.

The main goal of the Semantic Web Research Center (in process to become the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data) is to study how to efficiently extract semantic data from the Web, and to develop the basic tools for such an efficient extraction. This is an initiative that brings together professors, researchers and students from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, University of Chile and the University of Talca, which is funded by the Millennium Scientific Initiative.