Semantic Web Applications

Unfortunately, the Semantic Web is dissimilar in many ways from the World Wide Web, including that you can't just point people to a Web site for them to realise how it's working, and what it is. However, there have been a number of small scale Semantic Web applications written up. One of the best ones is Dan Connolly's Arcs and Nodes diagrams experiment:-

One of the objectives of the advanced development component of the Semantic Web activity is to demonstrate how RDF and Semantic Web technologies can be applied to the W3C Process to increase efficiency, reliability, etc. In the early stages of developing an RDF model of the W3C process, the tools I was using to visualize the model while working on it started working well enough that I started applying them to all sorts of stuff.

- Circles and arrows diagrams using stylesheet rules, Dan Connolly.

Of course, this is a rather demonstration-oriented Semantic Web project, but it does illustrate the feasibility of applications being easily built using Semantic Web toolkits.

Another good example of the Semantic Web at work is Dan Brickley et al.'s RDFWeb. RDFWeb is a RDF database driven hypermedia blogspace, a site where all information is stored as RDF, and then that RDF used to render XHTML. Plans are underway to incorporate more advanced Semantic Web principles into the site.