The availability of electronically stored information increased drastically through the development of the World Wide Web. Currently the WWW contains more than a billion documents, but support for accessing and precessing information is limited. Most information is only presentable but not understandable by computers. Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the Semantic Web that aims at providing automated access to information due to machine-processable semantics of data. Ontologies formalize a shared understanding of a domain and therefore play a crucial role for communication among human beings and software agents.

We will present the underlying ideas of the Semantic Web and will shortly introduce ontologies as the backbone of the Semantic Web. Further we will show how much effort is necessary to setup the Semantic Web and how tools can support this process. Additionally Web and Data Mining techniques can be used to bootstrap the Semantic Web. The idea of Semantic Web Mining is to improve the results of Web Mining by exploiting the new semantic structures in the web.