The current World Wide Web is syntactic and the content itself is only readable by humans. The next generation of the Web will combine existing Web technologies with knowledge representation formalisms. The Semantic Web proposes the mark-up of content on the Web using formal ontology's that structure essential data for the purpose of comprehensive machine understanding. On the syntactical level, standardization is an important topic. Many standards which can be used to integrate different information sources have evolved. Beside the classical database interfaces like ODBC, web-oriented standards like HTML, XML, RDF and OWL increase in importance. As the World Wide Web offers the greatest potential for sharing information, we will base our paper on these evolving standards.