My thoughts re Tim Bray's thread on RDF. [via Scripting News]
Key excerpt of relevance to us (as potential providers of an application that demonstrates RDFs value prop.):
It's not the syntax that makes the difference, it's the app. History supports this view. How many people tried to pry apart the obscure Excel file format on the Mac? Or the Lotus file format on the PC? Name all the market leaders of the past, and only the Web had both the killer app and a transparent format. Maybe the relationship is multiplicative. Maybe Excel would have been the Web if it had used an open file format that anyone could understand. What if you could have created a spreadsheet with BBEdit or a HyperTalk script? The mind boggles at the possibilities (it never happened, of course).
Even in Office 2003 there is a failure to really open things up.
An aside, Jean Paoli rushes into the room, jumping up and down and saying "That's what I'm doing that's what I'm doing."
Anyway, I don't see any killer apps in the RDF crowd. I see lots of people with strong opinions and not much software. Killer apps are not something you wish into existence. Lots of people have said that RDF models a relational database. Okay that tells me something important, the killer app is a relational database.
Ha Ha!
But we already have relational databases. They were new when I was a grad student, and that was a long time ago.
Yeah, but what we don't have is a relational databases that incorporate RDF as part of the database technology evolution roadmap. Of course many will get it (and FUD-emulate) when we unveil something via Virtuoso.