There’s Semantics in Them Thar Hills

Bill de hÓra rightfully proposes that it would be very interesting to augment Planet software with scanning tools extracting RDF from uF and republishing the RDF for SPARQL queries or as RSS1.0.

I've often wondered why PlanetRDF.com, or something like it, doesn't use semantic technologies to pull blog posts from the blogosphere that are related to, or about, semantic web technologies, RDF, OWL, etc. What's stopping this from happening?

Isn't the great Use Case of the semantic web to allow for more exact searches of web information? (I'm not specifically talking about Google knowing the difference between an apple (the fruit) and Apple (the computer company)) Why can't I say, "Create a Planet of all blog posts that are about the Semantic Web. Oh, and use only posts from authors who are known by Dave Beckett, Danny Ayers, and those that work with Jim Hendler." Wouldn't that be neat?

Of course, there is benefit in a human edited Planet RDF.

But what would it take to build one by using semantic web technologies other than RSS 1.0?

Would that mean all blog authors that want their post to show up at Planet RDF 2.0 would have to mark the subject of their post with a globally agreed upon URI? Or a set of URIs, of which they are unified by some agreed upon OWL?

Or would a simple set of tags work just as well?

How would we build this site right now, using the data that is on the web right now?

I see lots of XHTML, CSS, tags (in various formats, alas), Atom, RSS 2.0, and some RSS 1.0, microformats, a smidge of FOAF. There's got to be a lot of great semantic information in that mix.

Wow, I certainly can ramble.

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