Back in May of 2006 there were several messages on the govdoc-l mailing list under the topic “Anti-HTML bias in cataloguing and harvesting” that discussed the semantic web and its possible implications for government information on the web. A new article from O’Reilly posits that some of the biggest and best projects on the web today are based on Semantic Web principles.
- Why the World is ready for the Semantic Web by Dan Zambonini, O’Reilly XML.com, June 28, 2006
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Thanks for posting about the semantic web. As more than a few comments to Zambonini’s article pointed out, SW has a long way to go and the technologies surrounding SW are not easily applied. However, I am heartened that the underlying concepts of SW are in the mainstream of the internet. Some initiatives in the library world point to the fact that libraries are at the forefront of SW application (despite Library of Congress recently dropping their support for the series authority file!) and show that SW can and should be strived for. Some of the things I’ve come across recently are:
These are just a few intitiatives of interest. Libraries need to keep creating and collecting metadata in order for the SW to become a reality beyond the computer science labs of academia.