In response to the ReadWriteWeb piece titled: Semantic Web: What is the Killer App. by
Alex Iskold:
Information overload and Data Portability are two of the most
pressing and imminent challenges affecting every individual
connected to the global village exposed by the Internet and World
Wide Web. I wrote an earlier post titled: Why We Need Linked Data that shed light on
frequently overlooked realities about the Document Web.
The real Killer application of the Semantic Web (imho) is
Linked Data (or Hyperdata), just as the
killer application of the Document Web was Linked Documents
(Hyperlinks). Linked Data enables human users (indirectly) and
software agents (directly in response to human instruction) to
traverse Web Data Spaces (Linked Data enclaves within the Giant Global Graph).
Semantic Web applications (conduits between humans and agents)
that take advantage of Linked Data include:
DBpedia - General Knowledge sourced from
Wikipedia and a host of other Linked Data
Spaces.
Various Linked Data Browsers: Zitgist Data
Viewer, OpenLink RDF Browser, DISCO Browser, and TimBL's Tabulator.
zLknks - Linked Data Lookup technology for Web
Content Publishing systems (note: more to come on this in a future
post).
OpenLink Data Spaces - a solution for Data
Portability via a Linked Data Junction Box for Web 1.0 ((X)HTML
Document Webs), 2.0 (XML Web Services based Content Publishing,
Content Syndication, and Aggregation), and 3.0 (Linked Data) Data
Spaces. Thus, via my URI (when viewed through a Linked Data
Browser/Viewer) you can traverse my Data Space (i.e my Linked Data
Graph) generated by the following activities:
My RSS & Atom Content Subscriptions (what used to be called
a "Blogroll")
My Bookmarks (from my Desktop and Del.icio.us)
and other things I choose to share with the public via the
Web
Virtuoso - a Universal Server Platform that
includes RDF Data Management, RDFization Middleware, SQL-RDF Mapping, RDF Linked Data Deployment, alongside a
hybrid/multi-model, virtual/federated data service in a single
product offering.
BTW - There is a
Linked Data Workshop at this years
World Wide Web
conference. Also note the
Healthcare & Life Science Workshop which
is a related Linked Data technology and Semantic Web best practices
realm.