The semantic web is here...again

The O'Reilly Radar is at work again. Tim is focusing his attention on what I found to be the most compelling point in his web 2.0 manifesto...data.

There is a lot excitement on the web these days relative to the old topic of the semantic web. The term used is metatagging. It has been popularized by websites such as del.icio.us and flickr where you can ascribe your own meta data to information (bookmarks or images) that you are posting to an online database. Now the idea is being taken further by some folks at a company called MetaWeb (lead by AI guru Danny Hillis). Their project Freebase is a free database of information, a lot like the Wikipedia, where users can assign their own metadata to entries and also dynamically help create the ontology. Other companies have similar projects in the works, like Google Base, and Open Directory project.