Links to good resources about metadata and related tools.

Religion, authority and the role of technology.

Much of the criticism aimed at The Semantic Web relates to it's difficulty - both to learn and to implement - but technical issues aren't the only problem. A greater problem may be human nature itself - do people have a self-interest sufficient to motivate them to implement the Semantic Web, and, if implemented, will people pay any attention to it?

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is an XML specification for documenting metadata. In a nutshell, an RDF file is a collection of statements about some resource (a resource is anything with a URI) and these statements can be formally expressed in XML. Each statement comprises three elements - a resource name, a property name and a property value, also known as the subject, predicate and object respectively. For example, if I want to say that this article was written by Mark Choate, the three terms would be something like this:

Statements and statements about statements and why we should care.