The Semantic Universe Editorial Calendar for 2009 is as follows:

 We’ve been experimenting lately with something we’re calling “Property First Design.”  We’ve been noticing a kind of a slow unfolding of an idea that seems to be at the center of ontological design. 

“Bella was such a Mary Sue!” my teenager said in disgust after she got home from seeing the movie Twilight.
“Mary Sue?”
“Yeah, you know, she was like this little too perfect girl. Talk about epic fail!” she replied heading upstairs. “I promised my cosplay group I’d IM them when I got back and talk more about it.”

It’s tough times out there for little companies swimming in big markets, and unlike some pundits, I don’t pretend that the Semantic Web has already “made it” as a quantifiable software market. In the Semantic Web for Dummies book, I’ve tried to offer a lot of practical advice about which uses of the Semantic Web are making people’s lives easier today.

Stephen Wolfram generously gave me a two-hour demo of Wolfram Alpha last evening, and I was quite positively impressed.  As he said, it’s not AI, and not aiming to be, so it shouldn’t be measured by contrasting it with HAL or Cyc but with Google or Yahoo. 

O’Reilly Media (http://oreilly.com/), the current name for the geek publishing giant founded by Tim O’Reilly, has finally joined the Semantic Web.  O’Reilly’s coining of the term “Web 2.0″ and early misunderstandings of the Semantic Web stack lead some to think that he didn’t see much value in machine readable information.  That seems to have changed, at least in within <a href=”http://labs.oreilly.com/“>O’Reilly Labs</a>.

I was talking to a project manager within a large and very sophisticated enterprise this week about why her organization chose to go with an ERP-based implementation as opposed to a semantics-based implementation on a new master data system.  She was pushing for the semantic solution, but they weighed the pros and cons to each approach and came down in favor of the ERP system. 

We’ve put an OWL version of the Dublin Core out on our web site, feel free to use it as is or copy and modify it. 

http://ontologies.semanticarts.com/dublincore/dublincore.owl

In the act of doing this we recognized that there are so many different ways of doing this, there may never be a standard.  A few quick notes on the design tradeoffs we made here:

I should explain first, that In addition to my role at Semantic Universe, I oversee the annual educational conference on enterprise data management (EDM), called Enterprise Data World. About 900 enterprise data people will be converging on Tampa for the next event on April 5-9, 2009.