A recent spate of postings at Planet RDF revolve around a two-day session on SPARQL that’s coming up in Europe. It was reading through these that something I noticed recently became more apparent: that most of the semantic web effort, or the effort that’s involved with RDF, is happening in Europe (with some side trips into Canada when the weather is good).
In the United States, on the other hand, most of the discussion is about folksonomies. We are a nation filled people raising excited fingers from both coasts to point at delicious, flickr, Technorati, and Wikipedia; matched with solemn assurances that these new ‘bottom up’ systems are going to kick the butt of ‘formal’ ontologies.
Leaving aside whether one would want a doctor who learned biology the ‘folksonomic’ way, is there a geographical split to the direction of study for the semantic web? Are ‘folksonomies’ becoming the fast food of semantics–the McDonald’s of taxomonies? If so, then are we in the US going to end up with obese vocabularies, barely able to clasp the belt of understanding around their middles?
And I want to know why events like these never happen in St. Louis. Is it an European/Canadian plot to slowly dumb down America until they can quietly invade us one day, and we don’t even know it until a tag appears in Technorati labeled “AllYourMetaBelongToUs”?
All I can say is I didn’t vote for him!
As for having a meeting here, we have beer, too. Good beer. In fact, Budweiser is located her…
As for having a meeting here, we have wine, too. Good wine. Stomped by only the finest squirrel and beaver.