Today’s Reading: A Semantic Web Primer

I started “A Semantic Web Primer” today at the urging of a colleague. Chapter 1 seemed to say, “If web sites exposes structured data using a language we could all agree on (or a mapping to a language we could all agree on [or a mapping to a mapping…]), we could build much cooler apps w/ the data that’s already on the web.” I find that to be an eminently reasonable argument. Plus, it sounds line “an ontology” is “a class diagram,” so I’m already at home. : )

Unfortunately, we’ve got a chicken ‘n’ egg problem here, i.e. no one’s going to build the cool apps ’til the info is available and nobody’s going to make their info available ’til there’s cool apps to plug into. How did RSS make it over that hump?

Chapter 2 was a summary of XML, i.e. useless for anyone reading this site.

I’m hoping to get to Chapter 3: RDF tomorrow.

Anyone got any arrows in the back trying to use this technology that they’d like to share?