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From the article:

Revised: Oct 4 2007

News Flash: Wikipedia's and W3C's Definitions Of Semantic Web Have Changed !

Wikipedia has a new definition of the Semantic Web.

Oct 21 2008: the Wikipedia entry for "Knowledge Technologies" deleted recently, we seem to be going backwards ...

New Definitions for 'Semantic Web Rule Based Systems' ?

Many of the potential obstacles to adoption of the Semantic Web are similar if not identical to the prbblems faced by rule-based systems in the late 1980s. Therefore, the business rules methodology may be a good guide for development of the Semantic Web.

First, some basic principles.

 A More Humane Machine Readable Language ?

The proponents of these markup languages represent their creations as an improvement over implementing rules by programming logic, and that is true from the standpoint of flexibility, but I'm not sure if they are any more readable than programming logic to ordinary human beings. But this make the end user completely reliant on ontology editors to interact with the final representation of the knowledge. Are markup languages the strength or the soft underbelly of the Semantic Web ?

Another tier of terminology involves the "Web 2.0", or sometimes "Web 3.0". It's not entirely clear what either term means. One presumes that the earlier advances of "Web 1.0" and "Web 1.5" technology were restricted to improved content, database integration, graphical widgets, etc. However, far from clarifying definitions, using the term "Web X.0" seems to generate yet another level of debate on its own.

An old concept from AI, the semantic network, may have a second life in the Semantic Web. In a semantic network, ontologies of distinct types are interpreted within evaluation networks that get their meaning from the semantic relations in which they participate. In a sense, the subjects of the ontolgies discover their roles by consequence of relationships rather than by declaration or assignment.

The End of Google ?

On June 26, 2006 at 5:20am EST, the Evolving Trends web site published an article entitled "Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?". By June 28th, two days later, the article had reached 650,000 people - by July 1st, it was being referenced by over 6,000 other sites and had been read by close to 2,000,000 people.

Swoogle

A very interesting phenomena is Swoogle, a sort of Google for the Semantic Web

There is also an interesting comment on the Swoogle Blog, probably belonging more properly to previous section.

The Object Web

The ideas of a "Semantic Web" had been around in various guises for several years prior to the Scientific American article. One precursor of the Semantic Web was the idea of "Web Objects" or the "Object Web" kicking around in the mid-1990s. The OMG was a big part of that phase of development of the technical infrastructure.