Raw

- a one-word summary of the Semantic Web

Reading this piece from Simon St. Laurent, mostly on XQuery at XML 2006, I hit a speedbump early on:

The dreams of XML hypertext are dead, or at least thoroughly dormant.

- but we've already got hypertext (in the form of HTML on the web), where's the dream? (Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of XHTML, but if need be you can get to that with HTML Tidy etc.) There is a New Gold Dream nearby in the form of hyperdata .

That term looks to be virtually as old as "hypertext", the earliest references I could find are to docs that don't appear to be on the web. One Google hit that 404s has what I assume is a partial quote from a paper (1992?) called "Information Made Visual Using HyperData" : "A HyperData system is a linked network of visualizations of data where the user may navigate from one ...". Hmm, would you describe hypertext as visualization of documents? I'd rather apply the terms directly to the interlinked docs/data.

Going back to Simon's piece, although I've not really spent any time with XQuery (because XSLT does what I want and doesn't look like the god-forsaken mutant lovechild of VB and PHP) it does appear to get close to some of the cross-heterogenous-datasource problems that RDF (& SPARQL) address. Like LINQ, it seems to be useful from a local system/programmers point of view. But I'm still convinced that working at the syntax/grammar level without any common data model/language (i.e. semantics) is fundamentally flawed when it comes to global interop. On the web interop starts with URIs for concepts & resources and their relations, not angle brackets. [PS. reworded - amounts to the same, but sounds less abstract]

Bonus link: Matteo Brunati uses the term in his sketch of a personal knowledge manager tool (and also mentions my name, which is nice ;-)