Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
After the book had been out for a while, I took a longish break from most RDF work, being both tired and more than a bit burned out re-writing the book through variations of the specs. Probably not as tired as the RDF specification authors, but tired.
When I started back up, I immediately went out to Dave Beckett’s RDF Resource page to see what new goodies have appeared based on the final release of the RDF specifications this last Spring. I was surprised to see that aside from a small flurry of activity related to RDF editors, there hasn’t been that many new projects associated with RDF.
I’ve also been following Danny Ayers weblog because if anyone keeps up with RDF work, it’s Danny. Of course, I also read his pages for the cat photos, too.
Danny has been making announcements of new work, such as the new version of RAP (RDF API for PHP). But other than some experimental stuff with RDF and groups, discussions about FOAF, Mozilla, and Edd Dumbill’s DOAP, there hasn’t been much applied use of RDF.
In fact, the earlier enthusiasm for RDF in 2001 and 2002 seems to have flickered in 2003, and is now drastically waning in 2004.
Where’s the real world use of RDF? Is it to be doomed to isolated proprietary applications, a few simple feeds, escoteric experimentation and endless debate, like so many other great ideas that started in R & D departments?