The Economical Semantic web

My Semantic Web Alert beeped with this article from the Economist:

To this end, the web's übergeeks, the World Wide Web Consortium, have approved all sorts of snazzy acronyms that are supposed to help. The Resource Description Framework (RDF), for example, is supposed to standardise keywords, important dates and so on in a machine-friendly manner. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) will then pick these up and make sense of them. And if those don't work there are hCards, hCalendars, hReviews and other so-called microformat flags that will wave themselves to indicate where to look for various types of data.

It sounds a mess and it is. As a result it has been hard to persuade those who post web pages to include all the semantic-web stuff in their postings, too. Such marking up, as it is known, goes against the whole spirit of the web, which succeeded where similar ventures failed precisely because it was easy to use.

Harsh, but not unfair .....

We've said it before, and will no doubt say it again - the Semantic Web will be executed in small niches, where the solution space is far smaller a problem to solve, much like various EDI's. This is a far lower risk approach, and the people who execute will decide what technologies to use and how.

I'd look at the early day niches for M2M to define where I'd guess it will really take off.