Is anyone actually using the Semantic Web? Does anyone know of working sites that anyone not already in the cult cares about? Is this anything more than vapourware?
I know of no examples whatsoever that anyone beyond Semantic Web geeks themselves care about. Zero.
I am not asking for responses of “I’m doing research in this area, let me show you it” or “SemanticFooWiki will be the coolest thing ever, you heathen, as soon as we get the code written” — I’m asking for examples of sites presently existing, that people are interested by the semantic web functionality of, without having to know or care what “the Semantic Web” is. Anyone?
The wiki semantic web stuff that I have played with briefly 3 or 4 months ago was kind of flaky and unreliable (e.g. a test show-me-that-it-works query that I knew should return approx 400 results only gave 7, making it 98% broken). Maybe that’s something that could be improved, but after playing with it a bit my primary conclusion was that it just wasn’t useful yet in its current form. As to whether it could potentially be useful, if it all worked perfectly, then sure, why not? For example, if you could just query Google with “which cities are above 2000 meters” and get a correct answer listed as the first result, then that would be useful, no? The other issue is how content-creators enter semantic data … ideally this should be no extra effort above entering it in a non-semantic way, otherwise people won’t bother. So the lack of semantic applications is maybe more a reflection of the immaturity of the software, and/or the extra overhead of entering semantic data. At least, that’s my uninformed outsider’s view! — All the best, Nick.
This is probably not exactly what you were asking for, but the Semantic MediaWiki-extension is used on many wikis already and greatly extends what is possible with MediaWiki. As a small example, you may look at http://spiele.j-crew.de/wiki/Kategorie:Programme (a wiki I maintain). The page lists all the games in that wiki, together with a short description and some other characteristics. All this automatically created from semantic data. I find this very useful and hope it will one day be enabled on Wikipedia (after the performance has improved).
I was going to timidly mention Hakia, but then I tried Nick’s query and well, it worked pretty well. What do you think?