I've been working in the semantic web area (specifically related to life sciences) for several years now but I and the people I worked with always harbored doubts about the likelihood of the semantic web really taking off and becoming widely used. A key problem is that it was hard to see a clear "killer app" for the semantic web. Generating data using semantic web standards such as RDF and OWL can be a pain and what is the payoff for users to do it? Well, Yahoo has just announced that they are going to be supporting semantic web related standards in a big way, and it is possible they could become this killer app. Here is the relevant post from the Yahoo search blog:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000527.html
I've even seen some posts on other blogs speculating that this is the main reason Yahoo is holding out against Microsoft's takeover bid --- they see this new emphasis on the semantic web as a crucial way they can compete with Google and thus want to go it alone.
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