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March 9, 2007 by Trent Adams

For those of you following the Semantic Web debate, I’m sure you’ve got an opinion about it. Few people I talk to seem to be indifferent to it; they tend to be either an ontology cheerleader or are highly skeptical it’ll be possible to get everyone on board. There’s a related (and often confused) discussion between the relationship between it and Web 3.0 (fortunately, I think the dust is starting to settle on that argument).

Now, for the reason of this post. I just wanted to draw attention to what I believe to be the most cogent description of the Semantic Web and it’s attendant accoutrements. Specifically, some of the on-point posts in Nova Spivak’s blog, Minding the Planet. He’s an excellent communicator, and presents well-reasoned comments (ie. not vitriolic rhetoric), even though he does have an agenda to promote his stealth-mode Radar Networks company which appears positioned squarely in the Semantic Web space.

While you could browse through his blog to find the nuggets, here’s a short list of posts I’ve found to be interesting:

These posts and the Wikipedia articles seem to be as good a primer on the concepts as are to be found. Flavors of the debate range outside these, of course (and everyone seems to have some opinion about them), but I’d say, “FiDO, we’re go for Semantic Web.” (Realizing there might be some scrubs along the way to T-0.)