ontology on the semantic web, database on syntactic web

can anyone tell me what commonalities and diffrences are between an ontology on the semantic web and a database on the syntac开发者_StackOverflowtic web?

By going to answers.semanticweb.com you could likely get a thoughtful and descriptive comparison of the two. Since I'm short on time I'll just give you the resources where you can dig in further. See Wikipedia for Syntactic Web and for Semantic Web. See also:

• Executive’s Quick Start Guide to Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web
• Linked Data: The Story so Far
• RDF Primer
• RDFa Primer