Time for Phase 2

I was noticing the current increase in activity and general buzz with the Semantic Web. Recently, development work like: RDF in XHTML and Nokia's Semantic Web Server. It's obvious now, we've reached Phase 2 - the fun phase.

"W3C announced the launch of Phase 2 of the Semantic Web Activity. Two new Working Groups have been formed; the Best Practices and Deployment WG (charter) and the RDF Data Access Working Group (charter). These join the RDF Core and Web Ontology WGs, the Semantic Web Interest Group, and the Semantic Web Coordination Group."

"The aim of this Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment (SWBPD) Working Group is to provide hands-on support for developers of Semantic Web applications. With the publication of the revised RDF and the new OWL specification we expect a large number of new application developers. Some evidence of this could be seen at the last International Semantic Web Conference in Florida, which featured a wide range of applications, including 10 submissions to the Semantic Web Challenge (see http://challenge.semanticweb.org/).This working group will help application developers by providing them with "best practices" in various forms, ranging from engineering guidelines, ontology / vocabulary repositories to educational material and demo applications."

http://www.w3.org/2003/12/swa/swbpd-charter

"The RDF data model is a directed, labeled graph with edges labeled with URIs and nodes that are either unidentified, literals, or URIs (please see the RDF Primer for further explanation). The principal task of the RDF Data Access Working Group is to gather requirements and to define an HTTP and/or SOAP-based protocol for selecting instances of subgraphs from an RDF graph. The group's attention is drawn to the RDF Net API submission. This will involve a language for the query and the use of RDF in some serialization for the returned results. The query langauge may have aspects of a path language similar to XPath (used for XML in XSLT and XQuery) and various RDF experimental path syntaxes."

http://www.w3.org/2003/12/swa/dawg-charter.