Brian Kelly also blogged the report by Emma at http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2008/04/12/reflecting-on-openness-and-the-semantic-web/ and there are some follow up comments on some of this.

My personal view is that the more structure the better – but I’m not extreme about it. I think the thing is that many institutions like libraries, museums and archives store data in a structured way, but when they are exposed on the web, they often do so in a completely unstructured way – this is clearly wasting an opportunity. I’d also argue that once you have decided to output data in a structured format, you may as well aim for the most meaningful structure, and at the moment it looks like RDF is a good way of achieving this.

I’m no expert on RDF, and like you, I often start to feel lost when talking to others (more expert than me) about it, but certainly in the world of libraries, the same is probably true of MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloguing), but because it is seen as part of the professional body of knowledge we all go along with it, even if only the minority really understand it. Once you’ve got a system that outputs your data in MARC, you don’t have to worry about the detail – someone has done the hard work for you. I think the same is true with RDF – I don’t need to really understand it to be honest, I just need a system that will output my data as RDF.

The frustration is that as institutions we hold a whole load of structured data and when it comes to the web suddenly forget all about the structure, as if it doesn’t matter. The extra cost of outputting in one structured format over another is not going to be substantial, but takes some initial investment from system developers – and the only way this will happen is if we, as the people investing in systems, make it part of what we expect from such a system. At the moment libraries seem to be in the situation they were 10-15 years ago when the web came along – many catalogues were online, but all through telnet interfaces – it took several years to get to the point where an html web interface was ‘expected’. We now need to take the next step – where ‘web friendly’ structured data is expected, and I feel we may as well aim for the ‘best’ structure (although I’m happy to fall short – I’m not an idealist) – I suppose it’s a bit like deciding on picture formats – nothing wrong with a jpeg, but if you really want others to be able to manipulate your pictures and do something new and interesting with it, RAW is better.