[rdfweb-dev] RDF / Semantic Web going mainstream?

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 09:26:11PM +0700, Hendy Irawan wrote:
> Semantic Web seems promising, but to tell you the hard truth it
> doesn't really tickle me...
> I guess some other people do feel the same. I wonder why?

You haven't said why this is the case for you: is there a reason?

> Even the latest and greatest Firefox only bundled with a mere Live
> Bookmark supporting the very basic RSS functionality. If Semantic Web
> is going to be mainstream, at least something like Google or the
> mainstream end-user browser (and I'm not talking about plugins here)
> should support it in some way (at least generically).

The semantic web, for the most part, is not designed to be something
that you "See". It's designed to describe repurposable data, and that
means that a visible representation of the raw RDF really isn't worth
that much. As an example:

http://crschmidt.net/semweb/rdfbot/online_users.cgi?channel=foaf&image=1

that page doesn't mention much about RDF, but it uses semantic web
technologies at the backend to describe the information. The fact that
it does is completely unimportant, because it has no need to be blunt
about it, but it is run by RDF.

More and more tools are moving towards solutions like this, where RDF
and other semantic web tech are not shoved in your face, but they exist
in the background of these applications.

> I just visited schemaweb.info to look some vocabularies for FOAF...
> It's kinda sad there's been no news for the past 5 months there... :-(

There doesn't really need to be much news there: It's a self supporting
site, which doesn't need active maintenance. The vocabulary list it
maintains tends to be relatively complete. What news were you expecting,
really? "Site is still up?" :)

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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