I'm sort of suspicious of the "semantic web" stuff. On the surface, it looks good, but there are some architecture astronaut type people that I've seen involved and who I don't trust to "make something I want". Maybe it won't be this huge thing that takes everything by storm, but will find some niches where it's really that much better than what we've got now... What do you guys think?
The semantic web platform is still in its infancy. My cofounder is developing semantic web applications for a university's engineering department. They want to use it to catalog engineering parts and allow for an algorithm to determine the parts needed for a project based on set specifications. At least that is my understanding of the project.
Right now, the semantic web is very vaporous because it is an underutilized platform. If the platform is adopted more readily it could allow for software to process data more intelligently for nearly any industry. Essentially, it has potential assuming that it is adopted.
Although, I think it will be a long time before anyone outside of academia or commercial industry will find it useful.
The list was crap, but the semantic web isn't. It's really just the idea of putting machine-readable data on the web, which isn't a particularly crazy idea.
It doesn't even need any new tech; you could do the semantic web with XML, microformats, JSON or any structured data format. RDF, SPARQL, etc. just make the job (a lot) easier.
The only problem the semantic web has is that everybody seems to think it's this crazy complex concept. I'd love to know where the marketing screwed up.
Probably the fact that the marketing really is: "add truckloads of markup to everything you write using this bunch of over-engineered standards and, magic!, you have the semantic web".
I guess that if you want to see this semantic web happen, they should focus their marketing efforts on website designers (as opposed to content producers). Most web designers are willing to drink any Kool-Aid you feed them.
