I just overheard the following dialog between my six year old son and his play date:

Play Date: What is that thing on the Wall?
My Son: Security Alarm
Play Date: How does it work
My Son: If you click on that top button and then open the door, I will have to enter a code when we come back in or the alarm will go off
Play Date: What is the code?
My Son: I can't tell you that!
Play Date: Why not?
My Son: You might come and steal something from our house!
Play Date: No I won't!
My Son: Well, you might tell someone that might come and steal something from our house! or that person could tell someone who could tell someone that would steal from our house

LOL!! of course! At the same time wondering, how come a majority of adults don't quite see the need for granular access to Web Data in a manner that enables computers and humans to collectively arrive at similar decisions?

Putting Data in context en route to producing actionable knowledge is a transient endeavor that engages a myriad of human senses. We demonstrate comprehension of this fact in our daily existence as social creatures (at a very early age as depicted above). That said, we seem to forget this fact when engaging the Web: If we can't see it then it can't be valuable.

BTW - I just received a ping about the "Sensory Web" (which is just another way of describing a Data Driven Web experience from my vantage point.)

In the popular M-V-C pattern you don't see the "M", but the "M" will kill you if you get it wrong (it is the FORCE)! Coming to think about it, the pattern could have been coined: V-C-M or C-M-V, but isn't for obvious reasons :-)

RDF is the vehicle that enables us tap into the Data aspect of the Web. We started off with pages of blurb linked via hypertext (Web 1.0) and then looked to "Keywords" for some kind of data access; we then isolated some "Verbs" and discovered another dimension of Web Interaction (Web 2.0) but looked to these "Verbs" for data access which left us with Mashups; and now we are starting to extract "Nouns" and "Adjectives" from sentences (Subject, Predicate, Object - Triples) associated with resources on the Web (Data Web / Web 3.0 / Semantic Web Layer 1) which provides a natural data access substrate for Meshups (natural joining of disparate data from a plethora of data sources) while providing the foundation layer for the Semantic Web.

For those who need use-cases that demonstrate tangible value re. the Semantic Web, here are some projects to note courtesy of the Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) interest group:

  1. FOAF based White-lists - Attacking SPAM
  2. Open Data Access and Linking for the Data Web - Data Integration and Generation effort that creates a cluster of RDF instance data from a myriad of data sources relating to every day things such as: People, Places, Events, Projects, Discussions, Music, Books, and other things
  3. Content Labeling - Protecting our kids on the Web amongst other matters relating to knowledge about data sources
  4. Others..
Related posts:
  1. Data Web and Global Data Integration & Generation Effort
  2. Previous Data Web posts.