Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
From Planet RDF today, Leo Sauermann points to Zack Rosen who writes of a flawed research/implementation paradigm with regards to RDF. He states that researchers interested in RDF aren’t keeping up with today’s web implementations, such as weblogging software. They’re building ‘widgets’ rather than useful content, and so on.
One specific complaint:
# Researchers are not moving at the pace the web is currently developing, instead they are attempting to leap-frog it. A good example of this is the Structured Blogging and Microformats initiatives. Why are semantic web researchers not collaborating with the teams pursuing these projects?
I don’t know that either of these initiatives are going anywhere. The developers behind WordPress are inserting microformats into WordPress, but doing so without interest or even compliance of most users of the product. That’s the problem: semantic web is not an accidental web and requires some input from the user–not just geek to geek. There’s been little effort to reach beyond the geek with Structured Blogging, and I think that microformats have hit the limit of their reach.
I agree that the inner core of those associated with the semantic web do need to connect with real world implementations. I think, for the most part, they are attempting to do so. Where the failure is happening is that they want to work with Big things, and change starts small.
