[I have a client who sells RDF tools. Here's the latest version of what I've been saying to them.]
Let's look at RDF like a startup: The old RDF marketing from, say, 2003 was hopelessly out-of-touch with reality. Users were never going publish their metadata as RDF, and even if they did, you'd need strong AI to use it. Here are two classic articles spelling out why classic RDF wouldn't work:
But things have been looking up in the RDF market lately. The complicated RDF XML serialization is mostly ignored in favor of simple n-triples. Google is making heavy use of RDFa metadata when searching for products, and something like 3.5% of web pages now contain RDFa. The RDF conferences are booming. There are cool projects like dbpedia that are organizing publicly-available information as RDF.
So if the RDF tool vendors are going to succeed, they need to pivot (and many of them are). They need to drop the AI hype, and focus on what their early users are telling them. Some possible sales pitches:
1) RDF is useful as a distributed, schema-free graph database. Competition: Neo4J, other NoSQL databases. There's a couple of very good sales pitches here, including the fact that RDF databases are available from multiple vendors, and that RDF inference can be used to normalize schemas between different data sources.
2) RDF is useful for embedding small amounts of data in web pages. Competition: Microformats.
Comments
[I have a client who sells RDF tools. Here's the latest version of what I've been saying to them.]
Let's look at RDF like a startup: The old RDF marketing from, say, 2003 was hopelessly out-of-touch with reality. Users were never going publish their metadata as RDF, and even if they did, you'd need strong AI to use it. Here are two classic articles spelling out why classic RDF wouldn't work:
http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html
But things have been looking up in the RDF market lately. The complicated RDF XML serialization is mostly ignored in favor of simple n-triples. Google is making heavy use of RDFa metadata when searching for products, and something like 3.5% of web pages now contain RDFa. The RDF conferences are booming. There are cool projects like dbpedia that are organizing publicly-available information as RDF.
So if the RDF tool vendors are going to succeed, they need to pivot (and many of them are). They need to drop the AI hype, and focus on what their early users are telling them. Some possible sales pitches:
1) RDF is useful as a distributed, schema-free graph database. Competition: Neo4J, other NoSQL databases. There's a couple of very good sales pitches here, including the fact that RDF databases are available from multiple vendors, and that RDF inference can be used to normalize schemas between different data sources.
2) RDF is useful for embedding small amounts of data in web pages. Competition: Microformats.