A couple of days ago, an exciting article on various aspects of semantic technologies was posted on ReadWriteWeb: Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies. Alex Iskold, the author of the article, highlights many important problems of information workers which can be solved by means of the semantic web. This is a nice overview of what has been done by the moment in the area of annotation technologies based on meta data, semantic APIs, search technologies, semantic databases, etc. The notion of the Semantic Web itself is considered from various points of view, since as the author notes,

The Semantic Web means many things to different people, because there are a lot of pieces to it. To some, the Semantic Web is the web of data, where information is represented in RDF and OWL. Some people replace RDF with Microformats. Others think that the Semantic Web is about web services, while for many it is about artificial intelligence - computer programs solving complex optimization problems that are out of our reach. And business people always redefine the problem in terms of end user value, saying that whatever it is, it needs to have simple and tangible applications for consumers and enterprises.

On Read/WriteWeb there was a post about 10 semantic Apps to watch. It seems that the terminology of semantics is used for all sort of kinds. Our understanding is that semantic applications should use some form of ontology in order to describe the meaning of data/text and this includes named entities and relations between the named entities. In my opinion not all of the presented candidates fulfil this requirement. Nevertheless it will be interesting to see if the semantic search engines will leave the beta status and be able to answer questions to all sort of domains. Another point to watch is if the other Apps add more semantic meaning to their solution. At least Ontos with his news portal already uses the semantic meaning and offers first semantic services and therefore we are happy not to be alone in the take off of semantic Apps.