The Semantic Web when it arrives will be fully federated like the Web we have now.<p>No way will I or most people I know be happy with a significant resource (like a Semantic Web) being owned or subject to the whims of one or a few people or organizations. Open Access controversies gives a hint of how much unhappiness will result if Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or any one entity looks to have a lock on such a vital web resource.
So we shouldn't mind the internet becoming a corporate-totalitarian mining town because there's a bright future ahead to be built on the initial infrastructure brought in by the corporate rulers?<p>I would ask why companies lose or relinquish control of such company towns, and would the same factors work online?<p>To get the ball rolling, I would posit that the same factors <i>won't</i> work. Data can't be relinquished in the same way that land or mineral rights can. For example: once the graph of my college friends is out there, there's no way I can ever reliably take it back.
My idea of a semantic web is when the data on the web has value added to it by being able to tie disparate pieces of data together. The thrust of what Facebook is doing seems to be tieing my identity to data on the web. That's a different value prop.<p>One makes the web more usable to me, the other makes me more usable to other people.
I just took a better look at Open Graph. Certainly marking up pages with RDFa tags using standard Ontology's for properties and classes could be a useful thing.<p>The problem as I see it is that the Facebook corporation strongly discourages spidering the Facebook web site. It is certainly their right to do so, but from a research point of view it is a shame that it is not allowed to spider a portion of Facebook to get the RDF graph. It is difficult to know if something is useful if you can't play/experiment with it.
I'd be careful with drawing positive analogs to "how the west was won", in light of the results it had on the indigenous people, cultures and the environment.<p>...unfortunately the analogy is perhaps apt.
I have a problem with tossing around the term Semantic Web when their take is so much different than mine. The SW is about standards (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL, HTTP, using URIs to represent things and concepts, etc.) and a very large number of linked data publishers who hopefully use at least some common Ontology's to define classes of businesses, information sources, people, organizations, places, events, etc., etc. and to define the properties that have ranges and domains that are these standard classes.<p>I take a bit of heat for being a SW proponent but I believe that long term this is a big thing. I could be wrong, though.
If Facebook is at least a bit nice (and smart), they will use Freebase types to make it easier to link data.<p>Allowing people to free-handedly add entities will be such a mess--no different from what we have today.<p>It's not enough to link people to urls. It'd be better to link people to standardized, uniquely identifiable (unambiguous) concepts.
Considering how much of a mess HTML5 adoption is, I'd be extremely surprised if RDF or anything similar is "eventually" merged into the browser. Maybe for an extremely distant "eventually".