Currently working at Yahoo!, Dave Beckett has been very active in the emergence and development of the Semantic Web for a number of years. As I've been thinking about how the semantic web intersects the enterprise and specifically multimedia communication content , I found his simple, direct approach to describing and implementing semantics and metadata to be very helpful. Check out some of his presentations and publications. As the buzz meter on Semantic Web continues to climb, and terms like AI, Ontologies, Syntaxes and Web 3.0 start to cloud the thinking, look for simple, direct insight from someone actually writing code and using the technologies.
From Dave's blog:
"I often been puzzled why people write “The Semantic Web is AI” and “The Semantic Web is a top-down design” and “The Semantic Web is Ontologies”. As far as I’m concerned, all of those are bogus. I think I’ve worked out why they write this - they aren’t talking to anyone actually working directly on the technologies.
The semantic web is: a webby way to link data. That is all.
Everything beyond that is entirely optional fluff: data vs metadata, syntaxes, ontologies, query languages, rules, logic, …
This is my “lowercase” semantic web and the basis of what I have in running production code right now.
I’ll probably use that as my theme when I speak about A Little Semantics Can Go a Long Way on the panel at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose in May. ( I’ll also be at WWW2007 in Banff, Canada and XTech 2007 in Paris. )"
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