AO has a great article on the Semantic Web by Deborah McGinnus who I believe is the same person that I collaborated with in the 90s on this topic.
I have been working in this area since 1996 and have a keen interest in the Semantic Web or RDF. I rememeber back in 96 when I was hanging around MIT Computer Science lab and had frequent coffees with Tim B Lee and folks. Back then we didn't call it the Semantic Web it was pre-XML or SGML derivative work that turned into XML. Tim and us hard core folks who had the vision for the semantic web really were driven by the early work around RDF. I could still hear Tim's comments in 1997 echo in my head 'those stinking advertisers are using urls in advertising... they weren't made for that.." In fact RDF was the key to the early work...
At the end of the day the Semantic Web is about 'information about information' with an intelligent service model. Deborah hits the nail on the head but onlologies are difficult to build. Key to automating the ontology development process is the killer app - hint: my verticalengine.com project will address this..
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