After writing a few paid articles and doing a lot of blogging about various issues, features, and trends surrounding the Semantic Web, Linked Data, RDF, RDFa, SPARQL, OWL, and related tools and implementations, I thought it would be nice if I could tie them together into something resembling a cohesive whole. So, I wrote a short essay titled RDF, The Semantic Web, and Linked Data with over 70 footnote links to these various pieces. It will be a handy reference for me in the future, and I hope it may be for others as well.

5 Comments

By Dan Brickley on May 23, 2009 6:08 AM

Nice overview! Would you consider mentioning SKOS, FOAF and Dublin Core in any revisions? RDF isn’t so interesting without vocabularies and public data using them…

By Ben Stein on May 23, 2009 8:57 AM

Good essay Bob, was really interesting to read.

If you’re interested in the semantic web technologies, I’d like to reference you to http://www.urlclassifier.com a web-service using NLP and statistical methods for extracting the main discussed topics from web-pages.
Using ContextIn [Semantic Web]{} algorithms

By Bob DuCharme on May 23, 2009 6:07 PM

Dan,

Good idea, I will work those in.

Ben,

Note the part of the essay that says “I find it useful to think of the Semantic Web as being the Linked Data web with the addition of standards-based semantics encoded to help you get more out of that data. As the idea of ‘semantics’ becomes a buzzword for selling web-based technology, the ‘standards-based’ part of this becomes more important”. Can you tell us more about urlclassifier.com’s relationship to W3C semantic web technology standards such as RDF, SPARQL, and OWL?

thanks,

Bob

By Sarah Bourne on May 26, 2009 1:33 PM

One of the hardest part of convincing people of the value of the Semantic Web is explaining it in plain English. This essay is a solid contribution to that goal. Thank you for sharing it!

By Dean Allemang on May 26, 2009 4:39 PM

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