The end-user and the semantic web

The semantic web has been predicted for some time now to be just around the corner. It however still hasn't happened. Instead of waiting, the Drupal community has chosen to already start building the future. RDFa will be part of Drupal core, and an early demo demonstrated what the power of this could be.

It is surely true that incorporating RDFa into everybody's CMS is the way to get the semantic web kickstarted. But what will this mean? Sure, it will be easier to write mash-ups, easily extract structured content from websites, and work with wonderful RDF technology such as SPARQL, but it's my feeling that this will not motivate people to such a degree that they want to update the complete infrastructure of the web. I think it is only when there is real end-user usability improvement that the semantic web will really start to fly.

Happily enough, there are already some Firefox plugins available that start showing what might be possible in an microformat-ised or RDF-ised internet. These are the ones I tested:

Operator: Operator leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services. It is mainly focused on microformats, but it does support RDF. An additional toolbar appears which is context-sensitive, and provides actions dependent on the semantic data which is available on the current page. When for example contact or event information is available, actions appear that allows you to add it to your address book or calendar.

Zotero: Zotero is a free Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It is able to automatically detect various meta-field in websites and helps to easily extract bibliographic information. This tool really does what it is supposed to do. Here you start feeling the power of what the semantic web could eventually be like. The trick behind the scenes is however that it doesn't really use semantic data yet, but has many custom content extractors for various often used websites. But it is due to this that you get a tool that at least makes the web feel like it is already a semantic place.

Tails export: Tails export is a Firefox extension extension for showing and exporting microformats. Similar to Operator, but it does not provide really sensible action, it just allows you to export the semantic data.

Sematic radar: Semantic radar is a semantic metadata detector for Firefox. It's focus is on RDF. The plugin appears to be more of a developer tool, as the provided operations on the semantic data are of little practical use.