The concepts behind the semantic web are of a great deal of interest to me. I believe that as the standards, technologies and processes become more formalized and mature that they will lead to a fundamental change in the way that we conceive, create and utilize computer-based solutions.
My personal goal at this point is to become fluent with the variety of semantic web technologies. Some are relatively mature and others require a significant aount of work to utilize due to a shortage of tools or established techniques. I will share sample data, programs, thoughts and lessons learned as I work with these concepts.
Step one is to gain expertise with the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the extensions, Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). These data and rule structures have matured and are capable of representing any arbitrary information collection. RDF storage technology is becoming available in commerical offerings (such as Oracle's database).
Of course having data, especially data containing rules, is not useful without programs to read the data and reason (infer) over the rules. Therefore, hand-in-hand with my learning RDF, I will be working with software tools and libraries that can process RDF data structures.
