
Where Are All The RDF-based Semantic Web Apps? - mattjung
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rdf_semantic_web_apps.php
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joshu
I think the thing that trips people up is that the "semantic" in semantic web
is talking about the semantics of the schemas, not the the data.

I think a) RDF is a pain in the ass to scale and b) fails to deal with public
social systems, which almost always need to record the creator and time of a
triple, and this is a pain to always represent in RDF (reify every statement?)

Very early on, I considered using RDF as a data store for delicious, but it
was not even close to performant.

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kendallclark
Things change; I wonder how much has changed since "very early on" -- Oracle
11g's RDF support is extremely scalable, for example. Of course Oracle is evil
so YMMV, but there's nothing timeless or essential in Joshua's claims here.

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ilamont
Until now, Semantic Web applications have been a solution in search of a
problem. There are some cool apps out there, but no killer apps ... at least
not yet. I got excited when I saw the OpenCalais demo, but very few other
people would get pumped about what basically boils down to a platform that
tags, categorizes, and calculates relevancy for text content.

It kind of reminds me of the hype relating to grid computing. Everyone sees
the potential, but when most apps address the needs of science and finance
wonks, it's hard for the excitement to scale.

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jwilliams
One of the reference is actually a good read:
<http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html>

I don't actually subscribe to it at all, but it does give an overview of the
challenges for ontologies - and by implication the Semantic Web.

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wheels
I still don't know many people that like working with RDF. The ideas are
pretty simple, but I feel like they've been poorly conveyed and are hiding
behind a veil of ontology terminology. In the Directed Edge webservices API I
debated supporting it (and may still add such in the future) but instead went
with using a much simpler to read / write self-rolled XML format.

The problem is that RDF adoption assumes that people know how to work with RDF
... or honestly, even get what it really is (which I find often isn't the
case).

Another thing that seems to be confused by this article is that "semantic" has
two very different meanings in current web technology. In one case it's
semantic analysis, in another it's structured data.

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newton
In my experience, there is not a real use case for RDF or the other Semantic
Web standards. You always have to write domain specific code to actually drive
an application with RDF - so why not ditch RDF and write a domain specific
data store too? How does RDF contribute, if it neither automatically drives
any part of your application, or facilitates linking or relating of mulltiple
datasets?

This guy expresses the problem well: <http://inamidst.com/whits/2008/ditching>

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th0ma5
its true that it was designed by academics and seems very dry on the surface,
but it is an amazingly capable and complete stack. people have been
reimplementing various parts of it in various ways on many sites today.

regardless, if it doesn't succeed, then something a lot like it eventually
will.

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kendallclark
There are TONS of RDF apps...On corporate and gov't intranets. For some reason
or reasons, adoption has been very asymmetrical between public Web and private
intranet when it comes to much of the SemWeb stack. For example, see this:
<http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/Nasa/> Which describes a
production NASA application -- expertise location tool -- for the 80,000
person NASA workforce, which uses RDF extensively internally.

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epi0Bauqu
I plan on using RDF extensively, so maybe they are coming...

