Danny Ayers is pounding the drum for the semantic web - by which he means RDF. He points to this article by Kendall Clark for backup. meanwhile, Dare Obasanjo has found some contrary voices within the RDF community - Ian Davis and Uche Ogbuji have voiced some doubts about how well RDF actually maps to the semantic web idea. I especially like Ian's take on where the RDF community is:

There are several proposals for dealing with this. The one that seemed to get the most support was to recommend the latter approach and make the first illegal. That means making hundreds of thousands of documents invalid. A second approach was to endorse current practice and change the semantics of the dc:creator term to explictly mean the name of the creator and invent a new term (e.g. creatingEntity) to represent the structured approach.

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That’s when my crisis struck. I was sitting at the world’s foremost metadata conference in a room full of people who cared deeply about the quality of metadata and we were discussing scraping data from descriptions! Scraping metadata from Dublin Core! I had to go check the dictionary entry for oxymoron just in case that sentence was there! If professional cataloguers are having these kinds of problems with RDF then we are f*****.

That all came in the context of talking about RDF proponent arguments over the proper way to deal with the "author" entity in Dublin Core. Like other groups that have been at it too long, they are down to arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We may well end up with something like RDF being used for the whole Semantic Web idea - but I doubt that it'll be RDF itself.