I’m very excited to announce a new semantic web conference, which I’ll be chairing: Semantic Web Strategies, which will be held in San Jose on October 1st and 2nd. Jupiterevents, a division of the venerable Jupitermedia, is doing all the infrastructure work of the conference, while I get to mostly stick to the fun parts.

The W3C’s Ivan Herman recently gave a talk on the State of the Semantic Web in Bangalore, and he’s made the slides available online. Anyone remotely interested in the semantic web or RDF should look through the presentation; it may seem esoteric in places, with its talk of Horn rules and F-logic, but in general it’s a clear, up-to-date summary of the important current issues.

I think that Tim O’Reilly is overly pessimistic about semantic web technology, but in a recent O’Reilly Radar posting that was part of the freebase vs. semantic web technology debate bouncing around about two week ago, he brought up an important issue that’s often overlooked: what motivates a user to go to the extra trouble to indicate the semantics of a piece of data to a program that may read that data? For example, when you add “On April 2nd, breakfast will be served…

Some of us geeky types play with certain technologies just because they’re fun and useful to us and to our friends in the little clubs that form around each technology. We debate about their potential use to a wider audience, and there’s certainly been plenty of this debate about the semantic web.

Last Saturday morning, before getting on a plane from Frankfurt to Charlotte, North Carolina with a book that I knew wouldn’t last that far, I went into a newsstand to find a big, glossy, British Formula One magazine to supplement my reading. I didn’t find one, but I bought something else glossy and British: a special New Year edition of The Economist called “The World in 2007” with summaries of where various countries and industries are now and where they may go in the…

I’ve written here before about RDF/A (now known as RDFa), the spec for embedding RDF triples into XHTML using existing XHTML markup. I’ve felt for a while that it holds great promise for making RDF easier to use and easier to incorporate into typical web pages, thereby allowing the creation of a real semantic web of RDF data. I had vague plans to write an XSLT stylesheet that would extract the RDF triples from an XHTML file’s RDFa markup, and for sample input I did put together…