No love for the Semantic Web

Adam Bosworth: Bosworth predicts that RSS 2.0 and Atom will be the lingua franca that will be used to consume all data from everywhere. These are simple formats that are sloppily extensible. Anyone who wants to can use these formats to consume content or to author content. Contrast this with the Semantic Web, which requires that you get a large group of people to agree on the schema of everything. I only said half of that statement yesterday, the other half is the opposite of the point I was trying to make. I just think that everyone is still confused about the Semantic Web and think that it’s about people trying to find posts about PHP on Google. It’s about machines (TheMatrix-like ones, just kidding). It’s about me writing applications that will fetch information from the web and give me an exact answer with a large enough degree of certainty. A dumb example, would be to know someone’s nearest airport because I would like to book a plane ticket to see her. I don’t think that searching Google will give me that right answer and of course, it will change as often as their index gets updated, unless they start parsing foaf and take “nearest airport” to mean contact:nearestAirport and somehow there’s only on ‘Elias Torres’ on the web. danja made a good comment on both OnLamp and the SWIG.