Semantic technology refers to a set of web standards like RDF, OWL and SKOS that encode the meaning of data separately from the data itself. This meaning is captured in an ontology that acts as a dictionary to understand the data. Encoding meaning separately from data provides flexibility by allowing the model to change without altering the data, and ensures interoperability by enabling easy data exchange and combination. It also allows software to understand what the data is about, enabling reasoning techniques to extract relevant information from large amounts of data.