A Giant Whooshing Sound | Semantic Universe.

Did you hear that sound this week? The giant whooshing sound? There was a great disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of Semantic Web academics, implementors and enthusiasts sighed in unison and their critics were silenced. I believe something wonderful has happened.

With apologies toMr. Lucas, I don’t think that little bit of exaggerated whimsy is far from the truth.

First of all, just to be clear, I recognize that there isn’t a fully coherent view across all of these announcements, there is still plenty to criticize and plenty of work to do. However, in the nearly ten years I have been following Semantic Web-related topics, I can’t remember a week even remotely like this one.

What we are seeing is that the corner has been turned. The vision of a global Web of linked, structured data has been embraced. Following on the successes of theLinked Data project, activity by theU.S. andU.K. governments, large commercial retailers (e.g. Tesco and Best Buy with some remarkable results), publishers and, of course, major search firms (e.g. Google and Yahoo!), we now have a new round of participants.

DBTune has unveiled a newWestern Classical Music data source. Some fun sample queries:

• Works in F minor
• Musicians who influenced Debussey
• Musicians who influenced people over 100 years after they died

TheWorld Bank has announced that it isopening up its development data. Not only is this a strong commitment to transparency by another global body, but it represents a dataset that could start to make a significant difference in people’s lives. By surfacing development data indicators in a public and reusable form, the attention of the world will hopefully follow.

This week in San Francisco,Drupal Con has been taking place. Among all of the other exciting developments surrounding the next major release of this world class content management system isa firm embracing of RDF and RDFa.

Continues @http://www.semanticuniverse.com/blogs-giant-whooshing-sound.html

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