I absolutely take on board that the SW isn’t going to appear with the click of a mouse. I also think, however, that to dismiss these kinds of technologies is also foolish. Sure, from an academic perspective, the top-down approach isn’t going to solve everything. But the web is a reasonable (!) size now and the quantity of content already on it without any semantic markup or any thought about how to make this markup work is – to understate hugely – considerable.

I’ve been involved in a number of workshops where we discussed that really we should refer to the Semantic Web (capital letters = the TBL vision, everything machine-connected, all working in perfect harmony) and also the semantic web (small letters = microformats, small pockets of connectedness, screen scraping, low level feeds). I carry this over into the Dapper approach. It ain’t perfect, but it’s useful – and can work as of today, *alongside* the more “pure” bottom-up approaches.

As per the bottom-up/top-down argument…how about the enormous takeup of RSS (top-down) as opposed to RDF (bottom-up)?

Simpler technologies get adopted, harder (“better”) ones often fail. REST has huge takeup while SOAP has little. RSS has huge takeup, RDF has little. DC has some takeup, “better” (but more complex) metadata schemas have little.

There’s another very very good argument for giving these simpler approaches some time of day. Name me ANY Semantic Web application? Apart from a few very academic demos I can’t say I’ve seen any…

While this is the case, widescale adoption just won’t happen, ever. And until adoption happens, semantic markup isn’t going to happen either. Dapper et al at the very least adds functionality to the web *today* which will make the sw (or SW) better understood in a practical and not just academic sense.