The Semantic Web and Dataweb are two systems for making the Web more intelligent. They both provide greater assistance to humans as well as enable more automation of machine-to-machine communications; however, they do differ substantially.

The Semantic Web deals with adding machine-readable information to Web pages to help people navigate the Web more effectively. Using the RDF format, the Semantic Web focuses on cataloging data using standard ontologies (see Semantic Web and ontology).

The Dataweb gives people and organizations more control over their identity as well as more control over when and how their data are shared. Link contracts are formed between two parties that describe the sharing relationship. The format of the Dataweb is the Extensible Resource Identifier (see XRI), and the data exchange backbone is the XRI Data Interchange protocol (see XDI).