An overview and vision of the semantic web structured web came up this morning. I'm striking semantic web in favor of structured web because 1) I think it more precisely and accurately describes what we now have--the post uses "structured" just as much or more than "semantic" and 2) the S-web could probably make greater in-roads with a name change. There's just too much baggage and misconception focused on "semantic web" that's holding back adoption. The post either implicitly or explicitly debunks some of those misconceptions.

Here's where they suggest things are going:

I suspect this new era of the structured Web also signals other transitions and changes. Practitioners and the researchers who have long labored in the laboratories of the semantic Web need to get used to business types, marketers and promoters, and (even) the general public crowding into the room and jostling the elbows. Explication, documentation and popularization will become more important; artists and designers need to join the party. While we’ve only seen it in limited measure to date, venture interest and money will also begin flooding into the room, changing the dynamics and the future in unforeseeable ways. I suspect many who have worked the hardest to bring about this exciting era may look back ruefully and wonder why they ever despaired that the broader world didn’t “get it” and why it was taking so long for the self-evident truth of the semantic Web to become real. It now is.

I want to add one more essential group who will, or should, be interested: educators. Much of my enthusiasm for the structured web comes from the same source of my enthusiasm for writing with XML: STRUCTURE, and the ability to recombine and represent information/data/knowledge that that structure fosters. Structure is good. Structure does not "lock-in" or "deaden" knowledge, any more than than the structure produced by printing (the book) did -- it put knowledge in a structure that makes it more versatile, shareable, (re)combinable, alleable. Structured knowledge on the web continues on that same tradition. That's what we do in schools.

Structured knowledge on the web in the form that DBpedia offers us is a profoundly useful collection of sortable, sliceable, diceable, and analyzable information. We (educators) deal in how knowledge is organized. DBpedia (and the structured web in general) lets us look at how others have organized knowledge as a way to compare and contrast to how else it might be organized. Some queries on articles and the categories (folksonomic tags) they've been associated with exposes a world of ways that others organize knowledge. Why did they organize it that way? What patterns emerge in how Wikipedians have organized the knowledge in categories. What alternative organizational schemes can you offer? That's the stuff of a liberal arts education, and we're missing a big chance if we don't embrace structured web technologies as a way to pursue such questions.

And don't forget the essential last step after you've played with those questions: Take you r conclusions, and do something. Create an organizational scheme, and contribute it back to the structured web. Demonstrate that new and interesting and useful connections emerge when you represent a subset of Wikipedia through your organizational scheme. That, too, is what the structured web encourages, and what the liberal arts are all about.