The Semantic Web is one of those technologies I’ve heard so often that I got tired of it. But lately I’ve become more interested in one aspect of the whole Semantic Web: graph data.
Graph databases are basically one of the many different ways to store data - something which is currently being hyped under the awful name “NoSQL”. So much so that Neo4J, one of the well-known graph databases, even uses that term in their title now.
I’ve recently seen two talks about this. First there was the great talk Why Semantics? by Toby Segaran author of the book Programming Collective Intelligence. Then at yesterday’s swiss.py meeting Cathrin Weiss presented her Hexastore work which she implemented in Python.
If time permits I’d really like to play with Neo4J or openRDF Sesame. There is at least one project on my back burner where a graph database would probably make a lot of sense.
Toby has also just published the book Programming the Semantic Web though I haven’t read it yet.