IT Week columnist Tim Anderson claims today that “The semantic web is a long time coming“. What’s the basis of his thesis?

Even though a “truly semantic web would be significantly more powerful than today’s internet, not just for search but for integrating and aggregating data… The lesson of Google is that clever algorithms to improve simple text search have more impact than attempts to introduce semantic mark-up. The limited progress that has been made is in bottom-up movements like tagging, microformats and RSS, a dialect of RDF, rather than in top-down efforts to persuade organisations to publish RDF data.”

He points to the fact that RDF (Resource Description Framework) is not wide-spread and still only being used “more in a specialised form inside enterprises”.