Comment Re:Care to explain? (Score 1) 140
The Semantic Web is a failed attempt to extend the WWW via "semantic markup"
To think that the Semantic Web in general is a failed attempt is just plain wrong.
In fact, semantic web technology (RDF statements composed of URI references) is the best way available today to seamlessly integrate disparate data sources on the web. If you've never heard of the Linking Open Data project (http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData) you should take a look at it.
This project is already integrating more than two billion RDF triples, linked together by more than 3 million RDF links. This huge amount of data has not been manually marked, it comes from open relational databases. The trick is that, by exposing this data in RDF format on the web, one can create queries with the SPARQL query language that seamlessly span multiple databases.
The Semantic Web fails to capture almost everything about the entities that do the meaning (people) but instead is based on the belief that meaning is a property of data.
This is also a misconception. The "Semantic" Web web, actually, has nothing semantic about it. It just provides means to universally identify a piece of information on the Web (by URIs) and make statements about it. The semantics of these statements is left for the application to interpret.
Of course, you can describe domains of knowledge through ontologies, and then use this formal definition to infer new information based on existing data, but this is more art than science, and I believe this will never really become mainstream...
But if you look at the Drupal CMS project, they are already starting to integrate RDFa technology in the core of the system. I truly believe that semantic web technology in going to have a great impact on the web in the next 3 to 5 years. And, hopefully, you will never ever have to create the markup yourself, "by hand".
