The Semantic Web is specifically a web of machine-readable information whose meaning is well-defined by standards: it absolutely needs the interoperable infrastructure that only global standard protocols can provide.
Tim Berners Lee, Spinning the Semantic Web, Foreword
There was a second goal for the Web, which was dependent on the first: if one could imagine a project (company, whatever) that used the Web in its work, then there would be a map, in cyberspace, of all the dependencies and relationships that defined how the project was going.
page XV:
it was never favored and stimulated the development of the Web as a collaborative medium
.