Scoble ♥ RDF

Check out Scoble’s speculation on The Perfect Search: he’d like to find a hotel in New York with free WiFi, a good view, and good food, in a particular price-range. Rob, meet Tim Berners-Lee; Tim, meet Rob. Rob wants the Semantic Web. In particular, today’s freshest SemWeb flavor is something called SPARQL; see Kendall Clark’s human-readable intro. SPARQL is an answer to the question “What if I want to do SQL-like querying when I know perfectly well that everybody will be using their own incompatible database schema?” I’ve been a SemWeb skeptic, but I look at SPARQL and I think: Suppose you could assemble a ton of property-value pairs about web sites, and suppose on the front end you could build a nice responsive query page that allowed you to compose queries like Scoble’s hotel search; well then, SPARQL would be more or less exactly what you need to bridge the gap. Hey, isn’t Guha’s Alpiri project more or less that back-end? And isn’t Guha working at Google now? Hmmmmmm...