What is Semantic Web? Why do we need it? What can we do with it? This cool video (about 7 minutes) offers the simplest description and covers a few aspects of the semantic web. We need more of these.
- Semantic Web is a layer on the existing web
- By adding additional data (referred to as metadata), applications can derive more meaningful data from the web
- It is a way to connect people and data
Eyal Oren also talks about the project he is working on – Semantic Desktop. Most of the existing semantic web literature focuses on how it works, the underlying technologies (like RDF, OWL). So it is nice to have a video where you get a non-technical explanation of what it is and what you can get out of it. Hope DERI will produce more of these videos.
Updates:
9th June 2008
Yesterday I watched the this video Making Sense of the Semantic Web by Nova, a presentation at NextWeb conference. It talks about a lot more about the third generation of Web (3.0) and applications of Semantic Web with a brief description of underlying technologies. If you don’t like the term Semantic Web and want to pick another, Nova suggests “The Data Web”. While the current web is like a file system, the Semantic Web is a like a database, says Nova. Definitely worth watching this video. Nova suggests FOAF and SIOC as the starting points if you want to dip your toes into Semantic Web applications.
SMOB is a distributed / decentralised microblogging system built on RDF and Semantic Web technologies, mainly SIOC and FOAF
The SMOB client enables you to publish your microblog postings. It provides a web interface for entering new postings, stores the postings, and lets the aggregators of your choice know of each new posting.
The SMOB client complements the SMOB server, which lets you set up your own microblog aggregators.