If a friend asks you "what's this semantic web thing I've heard about?", what site would you show them first?
Suggestions:
- DBPedia faceted browser and example queries;
- Aggregate data with Sigma (to show the interlinkedness);
- PLOS website (to show a big site, running on semweb tech);
- RDFa for SEO in Yahoo!-searches, for example for ebusinesses.
Some very interesting and worthwhile websites are being produced around the world (US,UK, AU, ?).
There's also media management software using RDF and OWL. It's also intellidimension under the hood (like 'this we know'), but it's being used in MS on at least one product:
- Microsoft Interactive Media Manager
Semantic web technologies used in defence and intelligence:
More to follow...
A full set of Semantic Web demo site is available at :
Tools covered by the demos are :
- Open Calais
- OntoWiki
- Neologism (vocabulary editor)
- Kiwi
- Semantic MediaWiki
- Evri (similarity search)
- Relation Browser (visualization)
- Sig.ma (semantic search with credibility scores)
- SIMILE Exhibit (Facetted Browsing)
Could be a good place to test or demo these tools without having to install them yourself.
One that has impressed me recently is the QDOS FOAF query as this is reading data files to present something like you would see in Facebook. Morten Frederiksen's Foaf Explorer has been around for ages, but the QDOS makes it look more like a Facebook profile.
I'd impress on them that all the data was controlled by that person rather than by some corporation and could be used in lots of different ways.