February 22nd, 2008
Welcome to the Semantic Web
Hello, and welcome to this latest offering from the ZDNet blogging stable.
My name is Paul Miller, and I’m delighted that ZDNet have invited me to start a blog with them that can concentrate on bringing you insight and analysis on the Semantic Web. I’m grateful to David Grober and his colleagues at ZDNet for the opportunity, and look forward to fulfilling the potential that we all saw in setting out on this particular journey.
From its early gestation as a glimmer in the eye of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, through a decade or more of cutting edge research in universities and the R&D arms of big corporations, the Semantic Web has really begun to reach enterprise readiness just recently. Publication of the SPARQL specifications last month, for example, sees the completion of the core standards toolkit upon which application developers will depend. As far back as April last year, Reuters demonstrated their faith in semantic technology with their acquisition of Clearforest, and some of the reasoning behind that move became clearer in a conversation between Reuters’ Devin Wenig and Tim O’Reilly earlier this month. Last month, too, we saw Metaweb raise $42.5 Million in a Series B investment round.
My colleague, Danny Ayers, does a great job of tracking the minutiae of the Semantic Web community with his regular This Week’s Semantic Web blog posts, and I certainly have no intention of duplicating those efforts here. Instead, I intend to interpret the news, analyse the news, and draw out the big trends hidden within the news. Why does the Semantic Web matter, and what should you be doing about it?
We’re heading into conference season, and I’ll be on the ground at events such as the World Wide Web conference in Beijing, Semantic Technology in San Jose, and Linked Data Planet in New York, trying to get at the trends underlying the presentations and the corridor chatter. I’m also lining up interviews with some of those most closely involved in developing and deploying semantic technologies for the mainstream, and there will be more on the first of those in a couple of days.
As well as my own posts, I’ll be looking to line up a series of guest bloggers with interesting perspectives of their own to add, so subscribe to the feed and join us on an enterprise-friendly journey through the opportunities offered by the emerging Semantic Web.
Paul Miller provides consultancy and analysis services at the interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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