Dave Winer: “Anyway, I don’t see any killer apps in the RDF crowd. I see lots of people with strong opinions and not much software.”
Lets face it, this is true. But the fact that it is true hides something absolutely extraordinary.
From the way all of our brains are configured, to the way every language on earth has subjects, predicates and objects, to the way any box of any form you fill in on the web has a URL a label for the box and a value you type in – all these things are what the model of RDF is about. There is something profound about a non-hierarchical messy network and triples – I suspect it is the way our brain is wired and the way that any language or information based upon this wiring has to be expressed. So why aren’t people using RDF, where are the apps and does it matter?
The ideas of the ‘semantic web’, increasingly the ‘pedantic web’ will eventually come to fruition. For it to happen there are two possibilities: either everyone agrees on standards that then get readily adopted and apps. built upon them, or it happens through a trial and error process of selection and adoption of successful elements.
Because the first route is not working, the slower pace of the latter process is making more headway. Some of the key components of the promise of RDF and more generally the semantic web are evolving, quite naturally around publishing tools – and specifically the tools that publish information easily and in an environment where graph-like links between sites are prolific.
There is no killer app for RDF but there is a killer app for what it was trying to do – the weblog publishing tool.