Just posted this to a mailing list:
There’s so much hype and mystique about what the Semantic Web could be, might be, will be — I am particularly taken with a new series of articles (still unfolding) on xml.com about Paul Ford’s work on actually trying to *build* semantic web applications.
“The United States government and the Semantic Web are a perfect match: imagine all of those senators and representatives, each query-able by age, party affiliation, bills proposed, committee membership, and voting record. For the last few years, I’ve wanted to collect as much data on the U.S. government as I could, convert it to RDF, and build a site and a web service that make it possible to explore that data. This will be my goal over the next year, and I’ll document my progress here on XML.com.”
…
“Does creating a Semantic Web of data make it easier to analyze and explore that data in new ways? In addition to testing the Semantic Web concept, if all goes well, I’ll have a nicely organized map of the U.S. government, structured using publicly available ontologies, available in a single, reliable format (RDF), which anyone can incorporate into their own Semantic Web projects. It seems worth trying.”
