This document provides an overview of the semantic web including its conceptual model and major aspects. The semantic web allows for describing things in a graph model using URIs, RDF, and SPARQL. It is good for describing unforeseen classes but not as good for tabular data or frequent updates. The conceptual model uses subject-predicate-object triples to describe resources and their relationships where the description and thing described are separate. Major aspects include the distributed graph model, RDF for descriptions, and SPARQL for retrieval.