The Semantic Web utopia suffered from pretty bad chicken-or-egg problem: why would anybody publish semantic data when nobody used it, and why would anybody consume it when none was available. Instead of the utopia, I'm seeing technologies of the Semantic Web stack pop up in different places... CMSs publish RDFa for SEO purposes (see Google's Rich Snippets), and for example MeeGo's Tracker data handling layer is actually an RDF triplestore, with SparQL provided as the main API for app developers.<p>Apart from these, I see the big potential for these technologies in integration: if you publish your content with RDFa annotations, your site has an API 'for free'.
I got the impression that something was going to be proposed, but it seemed vague . . . is there something being proposed?<p>On the 303 stuff: I don't understand the problem. RDF can talk about various things, not just web pages: RDF uses general URIs, which could be URLs, URNs, or whatever else is invented. If you don't want to make statements about a web page, you don't use an http URL. What is the need for using 303 responses?<p>And I don't understand the JSON comparison. Sure, RDF in XML is dismal, but RDF in Turtle is OK. The core, real, RDF is just URI triples -- subject, predicate, object -- it is already very simple, elegant, and powerful. How does JSON help?<p>I do like the idea of RDF/data-web/GGG uses and applications, but I can't figure out what this article is really trying to say.
Nice article. I would argue that JSON is suited for a structured web though. Imagine even something like RSS turned into a JSON structure — if everyone would simply publish open JSON feeds we could have a lot of interesting client-side applications...