A recent @TopQuadrant tweet about legal knowledge and RDF/XML led me to Dr. Adam Wyner’s piece Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web on law.com. After reading it, I wanted to leave a comment, but this required registering on law.com and telling them lots of details about the law firm I work for. I don’t work for a law firm, so I’m just putting my comments here and expanding on them a bit.

<img id=“id202742” src=“http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51VH71S80XL.jpg” border=“0” align=“right” class=“rightAlignedOpeningPicture” alt="[“Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist” cover]" width=“160px”/>

After writing a few paid articles and doing a lot of blogging about various issues, features, and trends surrounding the Semantic Web, Linked Data, RDF, RDFa, SPARQL, OWL, and related tools and implementations, I thought it would be nice if I could tie them together into something resembling a cohesive whole. So, I wrote a short essay titled RDF, The Semantic Web, and Linked Data with over 70 footnote links to these various pieces. It will be a handy reference for me in the future, and I hope it…

After the initial burst of discussion about Google putting their toe into the standardized metadata water, I started wondering about the corner of the pool they had chosen. They’re not ready to start parsing any old RDFa; they’ll be looking for RDFa that uses the vocabulary they somewhat hastily defined for the purpose. Why does the vocabulary define the properties that it defines?

I’ve attended and given a few Scholar’s Lab talks at the nearby University of Virginia, and I’m kicking myself for missing a recent talk by Mount Allison University’s Bruce Robertson, whose field at Mount Allison is ancient Greek and Roman history. (A podcast of his Scholars Lab talk is available here.) He’s the main guy behind the Historical Event Markup Linking Project (HEML) and apparently even the people who brought him to UVa to give his recent talk were…

My efforts to set up and try RDF triplestores have been a bit frustrating. I won’t go into reasons here, because several of the efforts are on hold for now, but my attempts to set up and use Sesame went so quickly and easily that I wanted to write it up right away.

Many have wondered about what the semantic web and publishing can offer each other. (By “publishing” here, I mean “making content available in one media or another, ideally to make money”.) After following a lot of writing and discussions in these two worlds—and they are surprisingly separate worlds—I have a few ideas and wanted to write them up where people could comment on them.

When people talk about semantic technology, they’re often talking about technology that has nothing to do with semantics. They’re talking about the new possibilities that the RDF data model and the SPARQL query language add to distributed database applications, and there’s a lot to talk about. As Jim Hendler once wrote,