SemanticWeb - Raymond Yee's Wiki

The sea change of the Web: What is the Second-Generation, Semantic Web? is a previous attempt of mine to articulate what I thought the SemanticWeb is. There was a lot I didn't know about SW at that point. Now I know a bit more, as I am FiguringOutRdf, for example.

I'm trying to understand what the Semantic Web is really about

I've been wondering when there would be much thought given to the application of the semantic web to education. Terry Anderson's talk at Merlot2003 "Beyond Learning Objects: Towards the Educational Semantic Web" as reported by Greg Ritter is the first detailed example I've seen of work in this direction. I was intrigued that people seemed to recognize the chicken-or-egg nature of the semantic web: how to bootstrap such a complex endeavor? If there are no players, who wants to write editing/authoring tools?

Apparently me -- Tom Hoffman

Nice diagram relating relationship between RDF and XML. I got this link from Stephen Downes (StephenDownes). I have a feeling that since the diagram is produced by semaview, a SemanticWeb oriented company, that the disadvantages of RDF are not sufficiently highlighted.

I think the RDF and XML poster is very accurate. The Semantic Web vision is the perhaps overly optimistic one. --TEH

In my work at the K-12 level, where I don't have to worry so much about IMS, SCORM and other 800-pound gorilla standards, I've taken a turn into left field and just started sketching out an RDF schema for the standards and assessment data we use in our school. One feature I really appreciate is that I can do a giant dump that basically describes an entire relational database of a semester's worth of curriculum in our school and can be browsed via a generic tool like BrownSauce, or I can break all that data apart and apply it as metadata to the individual elements on the web--into each class's and project's web page, for example.

The trick is getting beyond the "RDF and XML do the same thing in RSS, but RDF is more cryptic" level. Working with RDFLib or a similar RDF triple store database is very helpful, because it allows you to focus on the subject-prediate-object relationships while it does all the parsing and serialization. --TEH