Standards

From the time of VHS and BETACAM to DVD-R and DVD+R to Blue Ray Vs HDDVD, the industry has a tendency to "not" agree on any standards easily. It always takes a test of time and market adoption to make that agreement.

When it comes to web standards, thankfully, there is a body that is leading the efforts to get the majority of industry to agree. There are large initiatives such as DBPedia (providing RDF access to Wikipedia), Wordnet (Princeton lexical resource in RDF), Geonames (geographic information about the world) following the standards such as RDF and OWL already live.

However, when you look around, you will find that API to major web content providers are plenty and following different kinds of standards. Web sites becoming web services is good news, the only problem is that it is probably not going to help much in meeting the big visions of SemWeb. Some examples if such API are REST, JSON, extended RSS, PHP array etc.

Another simpler approach to information annotation, has gained some momentum lately and is loosely described as microformats. The idea being very simple, embed markup within HTML and let the application read that part in structured fashion. For example: your name, address and email address could be annotated on one page and by just handing that page to a service, it could extract all the information that it needed. A popular microformat is hCard, which describes contact information about people, organizations, and places.

This is a simple implementation but is obviously not scalable.

Next step and the big picture

What I imagine is that as the business models around structured web becomes clearer, we will see convergence of the APIs and formats. RSS 2.0 is extensible to whatever you want to describe in it and is a big contender for a unified API that is simple. RSS is well known and possibly the biggest use of any XML format on the web today.

While the business models are in process of working out, W3C initiatives on Semantic web standards are working out as well. RDF, SPARQL and OWL will see a wide adoption in acadamic and research institutions very soon.

What I definitely see is that there will always be competing standards but that is not a problem at all. Once the data is structured, it can be transformed on the fly.

Regardless of what standards solidify in market, a big step towards the structured web has already been taken. The next web will be a precursor to the semantic web dreams that Tim Berner Lee saw. And for all of us, it will continue to bring on challenges to create new products and services to make businesses run smoothly and our lives better.