triple|scape

For several years now, I’ve been kind of obsessed with the work being done to fulfill TimBL’s vision of a Semantic Web. Now, I don’t know that I’m ready to drink the whole Big Giant Graph Kool-aid yet, but I totally buy into the technology. RDF(s) and OWL are really wonderful things.

A few years back, I was working on a Semantic Web In a Box called ontogon. I made some pretty decent progress and had a usable little tool to store and related pretty much anything. But I got busy traveling and working so much that I kind of shelved it, let the domain expire, etc.

Some recent discussions with friends have re-invigorated my interest in this area. Specifically in relation to how applications based on semantic web technologies can bring value to the enterprise. In the “typical” enterprise setting, there is a shit-load (technical term) of data being produced by people and systems. Some research has led me to the belief that 1) finding that data is hard, 2) making sure it’s relevant is harder, and 3) linking it together is even harder still. This is just the kind of area that semantics is really good at tackling.

So my next project is going to be a solution to this problem. Quite a step up from copy2web in terms of complexity, features and price point, no? I’ll post more frequently on this as I make progress.