James, you’re almost definitely right, but it would be good if you could elaborate a bit – why do you think scraping can’t “do” Semantic Web…?

I think it’s generally recognised that any alternative (“hey, publish your site in RDF!”) just isn’t going to happen. No-one (probably not even the guys at Dapper) would claim that screen-scraping is anything other than a pretty nasty hack, but the options are severely limited. Bottom-up doesn’t work, and never will. Top-down is therefore surely the only way to try and do this.