We propose the Semantic Networking concept as a candidate for the Internet of the Future. Re-thinking of the architectural and functional paradigms is needed to face scalability and complexity issues in the current Internet developments. A fundamental of our proposal is to reconsider all the networking and service operations based on the flow granularity, thus beyond packet or circuit paradigms. This is enabled by the awareness of the transported traffic, thanks to a combined Deep Packet Inspection and Behavioral Analysis approach. Together with the flow-based and traffic-aware features, Autonomic Networking is considered as a pillar of this concept which leads in turn to specific requirements. This paper is an introduction to autonomic features which should be instantiated as per the Semantic Networking goals, within the traffic-aware data plane ("Semantic Analysis", "Elastic Fluid Switching"), the flow-based control plane ("Flow Admission Control", "Flow Policing", "Traffic Aware Routing"), and the self-management plane ("Network Mining", "Knowledge Plane"). We describe each of these functional building blocks, their interactions, the requirements for their autonomic (or self-*) features, and their localization in transport network nodes to transform them into "semantic network nodes".