Did you know that when you search on the term “RDF weblog” in Google, this site is the first result? Does this mean I hold the fate of RDF and weblogging in my fragile little hands? Well, let’s see if I can do something with all that power.
RDF, or should I say RDF and OWL (since the two ran off to Vegas and got married a while back) are seen as the tools for the Semantic Web. Rather fine and dandy, but until that brilliant bit of lightning hits us from the sky, we’ll see if we can’t make the pampered little darlings put in a fair day’s work.
If interest in RDF is not waning, as I was assured in my last post, then where are the places one can find out information about what’s happening? I pulled my own small list together:
- Dave Beckett’s Resource Description Framework page, needs to be on any list for RDF resources, though I’m not sure all or even most of the real world applications of RDF are appearing in the page. However, it is a good resource for keeping up with the APIs, editors, tools, specs, and some of the more scientific work.
- Though RDFWeb focuses on FOAF, FOAF is it; where it’s happening right now when it comes to RDF.
- The RDF weblog aggregator Planet RDF is really the site that should own ‘RDF and weblog’. It pulls together entries from various RDF interest weblogs, including yours truly, into one spot. If anything can get the word of RDF as ‘real stuff’ out into the world, I think weblogs writing about ongoing efforts is the trick; using online or syndication feed aggregators such as Planet RDF to pull it all together into one easily accessible location.
- Once upon a time there was an RDF Interest group, but the W3C replaced it with the Semantic Web interest group. That’s because to the W3C, RDF and OWL are for the Semantic Web. Not the semantic web, which is really just people using RDF and OWL, a little bit here, and a little bit there to do interesting stuff (and someday all the bits will be all grow’d up and become Semantic Web). But still – always good to keep up with the eggheads. (Besides, what’s not to like about a group that uses words like ’smushing’?)
- O’Reilly’s XML.com is another resource, though the site focuses on all things XML not just RDF/OWL stuff. Still, it’s a decent resource.
So far, that’s what I have for good, centralized locations of information about what’s happening with RDF. A start, but incomplete.
In the comments to the last post, several commercial uses of RDF were mentioned; what I would like to see is some form of aggregation of RDF/OWL commercial application efforts. These are the ones that are hard to find; yet these are the spreaders of the meme – the bees, if you will, in the semantic web orchard, with bits and pieces of RDF/OWL stuck to their little furry bodies as they flit about, from venture capitalist to venture capitalist.