The RDF Challenge

I’ve been intrigued by the promise of RDF and followed the history from Guha’s MCF HotSauce application, through Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web

Although, like Tim Bray, I too have been looking for the RDF killer App. At one time I even had aspirations of what it could be.

It’s been a long time coming for RDF and as Tim rightly puts it, “… the killer [RDF] app that would make you want to View Source hasn’t arrived.”

However, I do think there are some very interesting applications and trends that have been emerging recently, like for example:

• Rob McCool and Ramanathan V. Guha’s TAP project
• Semantic Blogging @ HP
• Trusted Blog Search Tool
• The ‘friend of a friend’ project: FOAF

And I’m sure, many-many others that I’m either forgetting or I don’t know about (feel free to chime in with links).

Yet perhaps Tim Bray’s RDF challenge may inspire another round of apps that are indeed “killer”

Tim Bray’s RDF challenge: “To the first person or organization that presents me with an RDF-based app that I actually want to use on a regular basis (at least once per day), and which has the potential to spread virally, I hereby promise to sign over the domain name RDF.net…”

I sure hope so!