dbpedia Serves Up Real Meat and Potatoes (but Bring Your Own Knife and Fork!)
dbpedia is the first and largest source of structured data on the Internet covering topics of general knowledge. You may have not yet heard of dbpedia, but you will. Its n…

I also agree re. WinFS, MS fumbled the ball a little there. They could in effect have claimed a big chunk of Semantic Web development real estate. But I suspect their ongoing Entities-related developments sees them back on track. How well their designs will overlap with those of (Semantic) Web architecture remains to be seen, but I’m optimistic they will be within bridging distance.

Since I’m writing anyway… here’s another short walkthrough. I was doing some data gardening related to the “person” type, and saw Jon Udell in the list. I’d corresponded with him a bit while I was a tools guy at O’Reilly (note that in Tim’s walkthrough, I’m described as the only other “key person” at O’Reilly Media – bad labeling on the connection between employer and employee, there), and figured he was a likely alpha user. Sure enough, he had edited his own description and added some properties. I noted that his place of birth was “Philadelphia,” which was odd; our cities tend to be named with their state included. Sure enough, “Philadelphia” had been created accidentally by some other user as a “location,” and then Jon had reused it. So I:
1) Changed Jon’s place of birth to “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania” (which is a “location” and a “city/town”).
2) Added a type to “Philadelphia”: “duplicate.”
3) Added a property to “Philadelphia”: it is a duplicate of “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”
4) Removed the “location” type from “Philadelphia” to keep it from coming up in autocomplete for other location properties.
By marking it as a duplicate, if someone does end up using it, our topic merge tool can find it and its namesake and combine their properties. This will be more heavily automated as we gain confidence in our detection algorithms.

We wrote a white paper recently comparing semantic wikis to another approach we’re working on for making it easier to enhance text on vanilla web pages with structured info – which takes an unorthodox route via sticky notes / tagging / connections layered on top of normal websites rather than scraping/importing structured info from existing sites and databases – if curious, Google ‘enhancing documents textensor’ or go to:-

http://www.textensor.com/enhancing-documents-2007.html

Seriously guys, there are far better ways to do stuff like this.