Semantic Web

Gathering some more information about the Semantic Web idea. These links are from Clay Shirky's very critical article on the topic: a Scientific American article by Tim Berners-Lee et al. which is one of the key publications on the topic, an excerpt from Berners-Lee's book Weaving the Web, and the Semantic Web Roadmap at the W3C. Also add Making a Semantic Web by Joshua Allen at Microsoft, and another W3C document, What the Semantic Web Can Represent (a.k.a. 'What the Semantic Web Is Not'.

Incidentally, there are various critiques of Shirky's article as well, and the usually very perceptive Shirky doesn't necessarily come off too well here: Paul Ford, Kevin Burton. As Burton writes, "what technology does Clay Shirky like? He doesn't like metadata, doesn't like RDF, doesn't like micropayments, etc." Provocatively phrased perhaps, but he does have a point...

I also keep forgetting that there's still plenty of good stuff from last year's AoIR conference in Toronto to go through. Papers are online, but may be accessible to members only (?).