Just curious if anyone has climbed aboard the Semantic Web bandwagon yet. I've been doing some research into a lot of the formats and it seems like it's still a pretty young field. However, now that Yahoo has announced that it is going to support many of the formats, I have a feeling that at least some of the SW formats are going to take off over the next couple of years. Are you planning on implementing any of them? What are your opinions?

Here are some links if you're interested in finding out more about the Semantic Web:

Semantic Web

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000527.html Yahoo is supporting semantic web formats
http://microformats.org/ A site describing microformats, with news updates
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard A description of hCard
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar A description of hCalendar
http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview A description of hReview
http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom A description of hAtom
http://microformats.org/wiki/xfn A description of XFN
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core Overview of Dublin Core
http://dublincore.org Official Dublin Core website
http://www.foaf-project.org/ The FOAF project
http://www.georss.org/ GeoRSS website
http://search.yahoo.com/mrss MediaRSS specification
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/ Primer for RDFa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_RDF Description of eRDF
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/24/rdf.html Article explaining RDF
http://www.rdfabout.com/ Explains RDF
http://www.w3.org/RDF/ W3C specification for RDF
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/ W3C specification for OWL

I've been playing with microformats a little.

While there is a lot of potential, there are pitfalls along the way.

Microformats make it easy to share your contact information. With the right browser plugin, you can drag the info from a page right into your address book. Unfortunately, it makes a spammer's job easier too. Look at the trend of displaying email in an image instead of a plain-old anchor-matilto:

The other issue is data ownership. Most of the semantic markup is designed to make it really easy to share data. It's the whole, the web is your database idea. Why this has many merits, most site owners are very concerned about who is using their data, and for what.
There is a hug potential for really cool apps and mashups with this. But, the evil !@#$% who build sites with other people's content also get an easier ride.

So let me ask, how can we make the best of really cool technologies while keeping the jerks who exploit them the wrong way at bay?

I've been thinking about that too because I'm developing a CMS and I'd like to include support for some of these formats, but I want to do it the right way. An obvious solution to spam for something like hCard would be to allow the user to control what information is displayed, but in my mind, there needs to be something more than that as well.

For formats like RDF and OWL, I think you'll need several good parsers that can create the XML documents automatically before you see widespread adoption of those formats. Otherwise, it's just too much work for webmasters to convert all of their content because they aren't the most intuitive formats. I'd like to explore something like that down the road a bit, but it would be a massive project.

I've read a little, but I haven't really done anything yet with microformats. I think they'll be very useful under the right circumstances.

As far as the darker side I think you just have to accept the bad with the good. Paul you mention the evil SOBs who build sites with other people's content. Isn't that what a mashup is too? It's a site you build from what other people have created.

You can create a tool, but you can't control how people are going to use it. The tool will help good people and it will also help bad people. It sucks, but sadly it's something you just have to accept.

Perhaps if we thought ahead a bit and tried to figure out how people would misuse these formats, we could figure out how to prevent their misuse.

The formats I see the most abuse coming are the ones that deal with personal information, like Paul said. Of those, I think the two major problems are data privacy and spam. If you grant each user control over their own data, it's a step in the right direction where privacy is concerned. In some ways, I think Facebook has solved a few spam issues as well in not allowing others to see your profile (and thus your contact information) unless you allow them. (Of course, now they're starting to run into app spam, which is another issue.) Where something like that might improve, perhaps, is combining that principle with user-defined filters, much like Gmail uses to combat spam. By having access filters, each user can control what information is shared with whom.

The other issue that I see with some of the metadata formats like RDF and OWL are some of the same issues that search engines have had to deal with: artificial overloading to enhance search engine ranking. That problem will be mitigated somewhat because an attached RDF file won't be the only metric the search engine uses to rank a site, but might there be some additional protection against this? One simple thing comes to mind in comparing the RDF file against the file to which it is attached.

Originally Posted by VirtuosiMedia

For formats like RDF and OWL, I think you'll need several good parsers that can create the XML documents automatically before you see widespread adoption of those formats. Otherwise, it's just too much work for webmasters to convert all of their content because they aren't the most intuitive formats. I'd like to explore something like that down the road a bit, but it would be a massive project.

XSLT?

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

XSLT?

Not quite what I meant. I meant the automatic parsing and intelligent formatting of natural language (without markup) into something like RDF's triples. Something like RDF isn't going to catch on (or will have a very difficult time) unless there is some way to automate the extraction from existing natural language sources. The format, while useful, is just too clunky and time-consuming to convert to.

While not technically a part of the Semantic Web, another issue that is probably going to be tied into all of this is data portability. A lot of the big companies are at least saying that they're jumping on board to the OpenID bandwagon (though in many cases it's just lip service so far). OpenID is far from the only protocol being discussed, but at this point, it looks like it's in the lead.

Here are a few links that talk about data portability and OpenID:

http://dataportability.org/ It's more than just OpenID
http://openid.net/ The official site
A list of sites where you can get and use OpenID
Problems with OpenID

The main problem facing OpenID right now, I think, is that everyone wants to be a provider, but no one wants to be a client. What does everyone think of the whole concept?

I find the trend toward data portability interesting. Open Social and the Facebook Developer Platform are some of the higher profile examples of data portability (mainly because they're battling each other), but the rabbit hole goes much deeper than that. We're seeing a lot of examples of major websites becoming web services:

• Amazon will let you host your own store with their products
• Revver goes beyond the usual allowing your to embed their video- they'll actually let you create a video sharing network and use their library
• Blog Rush is probably overhyped, but if you take a step back and look at what they're actually doing, it's kind of interesting
• Ebay is also making use of their web services
• Yahoo, Google, and AOL all offer integration into their web services and API for your site
• Add This integrates many social bookmarking sites into a simple widget. They also have a widget for adding feeds to your reader.
• Plaxo is doing a lot of really cool things and so are Twitter and FriendFeed.

The list could go on and on, but I won't list everything here that I'm aware of. You see widgets everywhere that connect site in ways that are far beyond a simple link. ESPN has widgets that allow you to embed sports scores, MSNBC has the same for news. The trend is moving toward a web where data, people, and services from any site can be embedded, transferred, or utilized by any other site: Platform and location agnostic information and services.

What excites me and what I like to think about is where that will lead us. What are the possibilities of multiple sites working together in a sort of a meta-site? It does all tie back into the Semantic Web in a way because the SW will help enable and enhance a lot of what's already going on.

There are a lot of drawbacks to where the web is trending as well. Look at how reliant many websites are already on Google. A lot of people use it for their advertising, ad publishing, and their analytics and a few use it for their API. As more of the "corporate" sites grow and share their web services, you'll find that many of the smaller sites are little more than mashups, remixes, or syndication channels for the larger sites. People complain about Wal*Mart because it crowds out the mom n' pop stores; they complain about how the entire media is controlled by 4 or 5 companies; I don't think the web will be much different, vast as it is, unless we can figure out a way to make sure that the little people can win. Innovation will always have its place, to be sure, but there must be some way that we can use these technologies for the everyman websites.

I'd love to get a real good discussion going here. What are your opinions and ideas?

I wrote a fairly lengthy blog post on this if anyone is interested.

You've been DZoned

Originally Posted by willcode4beer

You've been DZoned

I saw that in my logs. Thanks, Paul.