Semantic Web

Hi

Fad, dream or reality?

Writing a paper on the “Semantic Web” topic I tried to find an example in search engines outputs and couldn’t find any. Does anyone knows a search engine publishing RDF documents? Why? During the Project X using the MCL language - the RDF ancestor - we learned that people are not naturally inclined to publish their site metadata. Maybe, I should say, very few people does and get the habit to do so. We came, at that time, to the conclusion (back in 1996) that if MCL documents where automatically produced by search engines this would lead to a semantic web. Even if the actual web document classification system is not the best on earth, at least, document are automatically classified and some metadata published (or I should say published in a rendering language “for your eyes only”: the HTML). Now we are 6 years later, MCL was transformed into RDF. I often see hot debates about what is the best semantic web technology between topic maps or RDF. I am wondering: Outside of XMLDev and some articles, where is the semantic web and what the web classification engines (search engines) are doing for the semantic web. Is the semantic web a conference, bar or a living room discussion topic or is it a growing reality? If you have any pointers to classifications engines supporting either the topic maps or the RDF specs, I would appreciate the info.

Thanks a lot

Didier PH Martin