Semantic Web - thoughts from Feedster, Loomia, Radar Networks

Some very interesting comments about the Semantic Web!

David Mark - CEO of Loomia says:
"There are a whole bunch of data types. There's now a large RDF database of worldwide restaurant data and restaurant reviews, and those kinds of data sources are cropping up every day. A huge amount of data is being generated, and it's really time to start thinking about the applications"

Nova Spivak - CEO of Radar Networks says:
"To do that well, you've got to have a bunch of things. You've got to have ontologies; you've got to have a language for doing it; you need a social networking mechanism to enable you to make these inferences between representations that people are putting up about themselves. And you need a higher layer that actually crawls or somehow gathers that data and integrates it behind a single interface.

Today we have this new generation of technology. We don't really even have a browser for this information. There are some standards that have just come out, and we're at the stage now where there's no Yahoo. There's not even a Mosaic. There's definitely no Netscape. The question will be really who is in position to make these critical, enabling first key pieces of technology that will catalyze the rest of it."

Scott Rafer - CEO of Feedster says:
"People look askance at blogging in terms of information quality, but there's that 5% when you use it as commentary around real journalism that turns out to be the biggest pool of meta data created in the history of civilization. The past three years have seen more individual human beings creating more meta data than all the rest of history combined. When you start ordering that in a reasonable way, or even the brain-dead ways that we currently do, you begin to get real value"

All of this and more in the Mining the Semantic Web article at AlwaysOn.