The Semantic Web is a new technology that attempts to achieve effective retrieval, automation, integration, and reuse of web resources by constructing knowledge bases that are composed of machine-readable definitions and associations of resources that express the relationships among them. To have this kind of Semantic Web in place, it is necessary to have the following infrastructures: capability to assign unchangeable and unique identifier (URI) to each resource, adoption of XML namespace concept to prevent collision of element and attribute names defined by various institutions, widespread use of RDF to describe resources so that diverse metadata can be interoperable, use of RDF schema to define the meaning of metadata elements and the relationships among them, adoption of DAML+OIL that is built upon RDF(S) to increase reasoning capability and expressive power, and finally adoption of OWL that is built upon DAML+OIL by removing unnecessary constructors and adding new ones based on experience of using DAML+OIL. The purpose of this study is to describe the central concepts and technologies related to the Semantic Web and to discuss the benefits of metadata interoperability based on XML/RDF schemas and the potential applications of diverse ontologies.