The vast and growing number of web resources show that lexical-statistical aids by themselves cannot resolve the problem of information retrieval. The "semantic web" project tries to solve these problems (and to do much more) by having the computers comprehend the content of the resources. This paper examines the current status of the required 'la-yers' put forward by Berners-Lee for the development of the Semantic web: namely, the uniform identification layer, the representation layer, the logical layer, and the security layer
