I'm keeping an open mind on the new round of hoopla over "semantic" applications.

I'm a known SemWeb sceptic and I still don't believe in the premise - which I take to be that we should define ontologies (or the semantics of URIs) up-front, independent of applications, and then applications will magically communicate together later because they'll all understand what each other are talking about.

But it may be that the "SemWeb" people have changed their tune and these new players are really only talking about a SynWeb with more meta-data and more smart programs guessing what it means.

Of course, I'm a bit of a pedant and I understand subtle distinctions that maybe the average tech. journalist doesn't. And personally I'm going to find it fucking annoying if we do get a SynWeb and then all the SemWeb people go round claiming that they were right, and this is what they meant all along. But I rather fear that that's exactly what is going to happen, and I'll just have to suck it up and adopt their mendatious terminology in order to be able to communicate at all.

Wittgenstein, bah! :-(