Radar Networks - Primer on today's Semantic Web

These guys are baking real-world semantic web apps with RDF/OWL. It will be interesting to see their products launch in the near future. These types of technologies will unleash the 'Intelligent Web' where we can see applications and services which are far more usable, useful and which people are willing to pay for.

NY Times - Danny Hillis new venture

Danny Hillis always is up to something interesting, though not necessarily a highly marketable product. This might prove to be the exception. Metaweb Technologies, intends to provide a searchable repository of data with semantic tags which allow for intelligent search results, instead of a list of links. This is something that is definitely missing from search and will require some degree of 'intelligence' at the front-end to enable, both in terms of determining what a user is seeking and the best way to gather and present their result. I'm sure that developing something like this is part of research at Google, if not Yahoo and Microsoft.

One thing this points to is the precariousness of Google in its dependence on search for revenue. If Freebase, the name of the intended product from MT, were realized it would provide a totally disruptive new search which many people would migrate to overnight.

I'd be curious to know if Hillis plans to leverage any of the work done by Doug Lenat at Cycorp. He's spent the last twenty years organizing human knowledge in a highly structured way.

From the description in this article this seems to be a very ambitious undertaking and one worth following.