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http://protege.stanford.edu/ Java Desktop Application.,Used to define/manage ontologies. Not sure if they have a web version meanwhile and if comes close to what you need. However it supports plugins, perhaps the frontend can be adapted to access a centralized DB. Oh, found it: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/We...égé.html

This is a info page with an overview about various tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Did you stumble over this: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki...? Dozens of various tools mentioned.

Another tool, I stumbled iver, but did not use it yet: http://oboedit.org/

And then there is https://jena.apache.org/docume...
But that is more a programming API to dynamically create classes to store/manage data in an ontology described database. (Did not use it yet, but looks promizing)

And then we have this: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/To...

BTW, I can offer remote programming/assistance in such tools.

http://protege.stanford.edu/ Java Desktop Application.,Used to define/manage ontologies. Not sure if they have a web version meanwhile and if comes close to what you need. However it supports plugins, perhaps the frontend can be adapted to access a centralized DB. Oh, found it: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/We...égé.html

This is a info page with an overview about various tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Did you stumble over this: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki...? Dozens of various tools mentioned.

Another tool, I stumbled iver, but did not use it yet: http://oboedit.org/

And then there is https://jena.apache.org/docume...
But that is more a programming API to dynamically create classes to store/manage data in an ontology described database. (Did not use it yet, but looks promizing)

And then we have this: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/To...

BTW, I can offer remote programming/assistance in such tools.

See my comments here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/looking-back-on-noemail-at-6-weeks/comment-page-1/#comment-441324

And here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/2008-ibm-predicts-five-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications-read-more-ibm-predicts-5-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications/comment-page-1/#comment-441613

And here: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16a346f

And here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/576771df555e729f

And a related back-burner open source project by me (being passed by): http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

And by others: http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
"The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major technological success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more connected, and in turn face new resulting problems: information overload caused by insufficient support for information organization and collaboration. For example, sending a single file to a mailing list multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and organizing this file times the number of recipients - leading to more and more of peoples' time going into information filtering and information management activities. There is a need for smarter and more fine-grained computer support for personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries between personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and establishing and deploying trust among collaborators. The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies. Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers. ..."

However, a problem with such books is that with material fragmented so much and the structure not visible directly, it is harder for someone to grasp the overall structure of knowledge in the domain if they're first getting oriented.

You can choose to provide, on top of with the multi-level structure:
1. many different "discourses" - linear/navigational paths inside the content. It's like providing many linear books build from the same content (your "prev/next page" nav bar flies on top of the content - instead of being embedded in the pages - and reacts to whatever "ToC" is loaded)
2. Different ontologies to organize the same content based on whatever "knowledge structures" are applicable.

Better yet, if you feel generous, you may provide tools for whatever reader to organize their own discourses/ontologies and share them with others

... why Mozilla has not made a social semantic desktop with all that vast amount of money. No search engine advertising revenues?
    http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
"The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major technological success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more connected, and in turn face new resulting problems: information overload caused by insufficient support for information organization and collaboration. For example, sending a single file to a mailing list multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and organizing this file times the number of recipients ? leading to more and more of peoples' time going into information filtering and information management activities. There is a need for smarter and more fine-grained computer support for personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries between personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and establishing and deploying trust among collaborators.
    The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies.
    Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers. ..."

But maybe sour grapes on my part as I applied for a job at Mozilla a couple months ago, suggesting upgrading Thunderbird into such a thing, and never heard back. I've been trying on-and-off on my own for years towards that SSD end, but some finanical support (and teamwork) would help me have time to focus on it more and help make it happen:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

... I saw the web for the first time at a public computer while researching our garden simulator. I was not impressed. Back then I had used Hypercard and Smalltalk, and it just seemed like we could do a whole lot better, and I had been thinkign about how to do that. I still feel that way a bit, alhough obviously the linking idea has worked well, HTML and http had broad powers in their simplicity, even with links not being first class objects and virtual machines not being standardized, and so on. So, first impressions can be misleading, although I still feel there are major missing pieces or standards. We need to push on to a social semantic desktop, IMHO, and I've tried some in that direction myself...
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

By the way, a little known fact -- the 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon, about a culturally sophisticated networked culture that "defeats" a huge military empire that comes to conquer it, inspired Ted Nelson to work on hypertext (I asked Ted Nelson about this directly when he gave a talk at at IBM Research, and he had forgotten the name of the story, but that's where the name came from), and then his work obviously was one of the inspirations of the web. The story is floating around on the web, like in Google Books:
    http://www.google.com/#q=the+skills+of+xanadu

Take a look at tagged filesystems. You can do the same thing by hand using symlinks but with much greater pain.

http://www.tagsistant.net/

http://nascent.freeshell.org/programming/TagFS/

http://semanticweb.org/wiki/SemFS

The following are not really filesystems. You need to use specific programs to search the tag space.

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~marriaga/software/oyepa/

http://blueslugs.com/2005/07/12/tag1-delicious-style-file-tagging/

http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16a346f
http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop

The Pointrel approach towards that by me: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
But see also NEPOMUK etc. http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
Working towards use as FOSS public intelligence tools: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866

The article would have us believe that this is going to expose everyone to massive amounts of privacy invasion. This is not necessarily the case. It is already the case that there are privacy mechanisms to protect information in the SW (e.g. require agents to authenticate to a site to retrieve restricted information). Beyond simple mechanisms, there is a lot of research being conducted on the idea of trust in the semantic web - e.g. how does my agent know to trust a slashdot article as absolute truth and a wikipedia article as outright fabrication (or vice versa).

As for making the content of the internet widely available, some researchers feel this will never happen. As another commenter noted that it is essential that there is agreement in the definition of concepts (ontologies) to enable the SW to work (if my agent believes the symbol "apple" refers to the concept Computer, and your agent believes it refers to "garbage", we may have some interesting but less than useful results). I am researching ontology generation using information extraction / NLP techniques, and it is certainly a difficult problem, and one that isn't likely to have a trivial problem (in some respects, this is goes back to the origins of AI in the 1950's, and we're still hacking at it today).

For some good references on the Semantic Web (beyond Wikipedia), check out some of these links

• Semantic Web Portal
• eBiquity at UMBC
• Swoogle - a search engine for Semantic Web

Thank you.
It's another step towards the semantic web.

...like the Semantic Web?

No, I don't know why it's being relaunched. My guess is that it's probably one of the answers that we are looking for in the age of search that didn't quite cut it. But isn't that what all these different meta-searches are talking about? The ability to get semantic meaning imbued into the web?

Slashdot ran an article on Bibster some time ago, which uses Semantic Web technology under the hood.

Then there are the entries for the Semantic Web Challenge, organized by the ISWC, which have some interesting and useful applications.

These are just a few pointers to semantic web software. There's more, I'm sure.

I'm reffering of course to the Bibster project
Bibster Partners and Participants Which is aimed at the shareing of scientific and research documents. All of which are by the fact that they are published, copyrighted works under the Berlin Treaty. Amazing how the world looks when you suffer from cerebral anal insertion syndrome(CAIS). Guess you can't trust those dadgum anti-American fools in them there Unerversilties. They might growed up and learned hows to think fer dem selbes.

A lot of RDF out there is in FOAF and RSS 1.0 vocabularies. Increasingly, people use to link RDF files, which makes it possible to have RDF crawlers ("scutters") harvest RDF from the web. I have an RDF aggregator service running that crawls the semantic web. There's a lot of useless broken RDF out there, so if you put RDF on your web site please use W3C's RDF Validator to check for valid RDF.

The technology for the Semantic Web is good enough - people and organizations just have to be willing to add semantic markup. This will enable what I would call knowledge based search. Some good tools are:

HP's semantic web toolkit

Protege Ontology Editor

RDF and semantic web tools for Swi-Prolog

-Mark

This was not ever realized, I believed mostly because of overpaid "web designers".

But the Semantic Web would require many funny user agents for all kinds of things.

Clearly, if this kind of thinking is allowed to persist in corporate headquarters, it will kill the Semantic Web before it gets started.

I wonder what Tim Berners-Lee thinks about this...

I suggest you to read about ontologies. Every "Semantic Web Server" might publish an ontology which describes what objects knows and how they are related. When a client or search engine wants to read the remote web, has also to check the published ontology and compare it to its own.

but it's more work.

So it's necessary to have good authoring tools that minimizes the overhead to publish content. Anyway, businesses will have the incentive to spend that more work in order to have a correct ontology that accurately describes its products, so they may be the initial providers of meta-content.

XML, SOAP (aka XML Protocol), WSDL (or something like it), UDDI (or something like it) are the place to start. Still an immature area so there will be more acronyms to "learn" in the future. Still a lot of "infrastructure" pieces needed for success and wide adoption.

Also sure to be hot and somewhat related is the Semantic Web. In many ways this is the way the Web should already be.

Marking up pages with information about the meaning of the terms on them is the main thrust of the work on semantic web - see http://www.daml.org/ (for DAML - the DARPA Agent Markup Language), http://www.semanticweb.org/ (One of the main information sources) and finally the new W3C activity on the subject: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/.

How far, how fast it will go is another matter but there's certainly a lot of interest in creating a more "machine readable" web.

Dis Semantics Web page on inference engines is suffering syntax.

There'll be alot of "You know what I mean, right ?" , nose flicking, secret pig latin codes, lipograms, monkeys-at-a-typewriter, Voynich artwork, McLuhan collages, the Beatle's song "I Am The Walrus", or on the darker side, like Frankenstein's monster; something that lived without first consulting planned parenthood.
Memetic epidemics.

The RDF stuff is interesting.
Imagine though the problems with semantic grammars.
In Britain and many of its colonies, they drive on the left and sit on the right. In Japan, Turkey etc. they use Lukasiewicz's RPN form: (SOV) Subject-Object-Verb which can be very tricky for "someone who drives on the right side of the road" to get used to. Alot of semantic accidents will happen.

Driving with diplomatic immunity.

Just give me a passport,a flu shot
and point me to the duty-free shop.

The Semantic Web Page is a good starting point.
TBLs personal notes Is another one. Probably the best one, actually.

"The Semantic Web" was a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee (we all know who that is, don't we?) to describe a www-like global knowledge base, which when combined with some simple logic forms a really interesting KR system. His thesis is that early hypertext systems died of too much structure limiting scalability, and current KR systems (like CYC) have largely failed for similar reasons. The Semantic Web is an attempt to do KR in a web-like way.

This really could be the next major leap in the evolution of the web. Do yourself a favour and check it out. And it's not based on hacks for screen-scraping HTML, it's based on real KR infrastructure.