As our pal and advisor Paul Ford points out, it is time to start thinking about what links mean. At Radar Networks we have been giving a lot of thought to "semantic linking." As opposed to the "flat links" on the Web, semantic links provide more metadata about their own meaning. This is important because it makes links filterable. Now you can selectively look for links of a certain type. But that's just the beginning. Once you put metadata on links, you can start using links to carry distributed, bottom-up learning -- for instance, the Learning Webs proposal at the Principia Cybernetica project. Much of the work we are doing at Radar Networks is presently confidential, so I can't go into a lot more detail about this right now. But suffice to say, we believe that semantic linking is important to the emerging Semantic Web. Technologies such as RDF enable primitive semantic linking -- but it's possible, and probably even necessary, to go beyond the limitations of RDF. More on this later...
OK, I'm intrigued :)
How in particular does RDF not work for you as linking technology?
BTW I found your weblog via a FOAF aggregator that had harvested RDF/XML from TypePad describing people and their weblogs... see Jim Ley's quick proof-of-concept directory at http://jibbering.com/foaf/weblogs.img.1
Posted by: Dan Brickley | September 15, 2003 at 11:11 AM