Incentivizing semantic content publication
When the semantic web is pitched to developers, one of the first questions that comes up is inevitably to do with the motivation for creating semantic content. “Why will anyone bother making the effort to publish content in this funny looking format to start with”, they ask.
I was excited to discover (through Valentin’s blog) that there’s going to be a entire workshop dedicated to answering this very question at the upcoming International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008).
As I see it, there are likely to be two major drivers that will motivate publication of semantic content in the near future.
Increasing audience : If a page is annotated with semantic content, search engines like Yahoo now support display of this metadata as part of the search results (part of search monkey - check out the sites exploiting this capability). This has the potential to improve the visibility of a piece of content and thus increasing audience. Other agregators are likely to follow suite.
Increasing utility : A whole bunch of small utilities are been created to increase the navigability, reusability and procesability for semantic content found on a page. For eg, a firefox extension, Tails, allows users to clip and save contact or event info found on a page. Another example is the extension from AdaptiveBlue which exploits semantic content to allow users to quickly navigate to related sources (go from a product review to a product listing page!).