I’ve only written up about half of my list of semantic web project ideas first described here, and the 2007 Semantic Web Challenge has just been announced, so I wanted to get another one of the ideas out there.

I was tempted to call this “Semantic Web project idea number 4a”, because it’s not a big leap from my last one. Perhaps if I generalize the idea more it will sound separate enough, but as you’ll see, my example builds on the last example.

Can a taxonomy help you buy a lightbulb? I didn’t think so, but when Ron Daniel of Taxonomy Strategies told me how they helped a big box hardware store with the product taxonomy that drove their online store’s menus, I realized that taxonomies aren’t just for classifying content, as my publishing technology bias had led me to believe.

For part 3 of my series on semantic web project ideas, I was tempted to take part 2 and do a global replace of “ERP” for “CRM”. I’ll briefly recap what a semantic web add-on to an open source Enterprise Resource Planning package would have in common with a similar add-on to an open source Customer Relationship Management package:

In part one of this series I described how the Tapscott and Williams Wikinomics book mentioned a few things that gave me ideas for semantic web projects. One was the concept of open source Customer Relationship Management packages, which I hadn’t heard of before. The book didn’t mention any specific ones, but a Google search on “Open Source” CRM gets plenty of hits.

When I spoke at a conference recently, the speaker’s gift was a copy of the book that keynote speaker Don Tapscott write with Anthony D. Williams: Wikinomics. The book is very biz-buzzwordy (from page 150: “consumer product companies can find ways to monetize customer-led ecosystems”—have these guys bookmarked the Web Economy Bullshit Generator?), and they feel compelled to coin their own buzzwords, from the book’s title to terms like N-gen, B-web, ideagora, and prosumer.…