lotico: The New York Semantic Web Meetup As we emerge from recession, we face fundamental questions about the kind of Web we want to build for the future; and about who will lead us there. Choices: about who’s best for jobs? Who’s best for industry? Who’s best for health care, schools and public services? Decisions about the changes we must make this year that will lead us to a better tomorrow.

Within the past few months, the Semantic Web has become something any Webmaster must take serious, because the key components are ready for production usage, and there are tangible benefits: With GoodRelations, there is now a standard vocabulary for e-commerce, RDFa provides a stable syntax for embedding such data in existing Web pages, and Yahoo Searchmonkey creates a direct business incentive for companies of any size to care.

Brian Pleet is the classic business professional.  He runs a small Canadian sales consultancy business called the Strategico Marketing Group.  Brian’s lifeblood is being able to accurately bill his clients for his time and costs and to manage the time he spends on each project.  Brian is well organized; his emails and documents are all nicely filed by category, his favourite online content is bookmarked, and his contact database can be sorted by type of contact, location, etc.  It could be argued that he is a real-life proponent of semantics.  However Brian spends a lot of his time on the road, and this is where his system lets him down.  Unlike his desktop world, his mobile world is represented by a wireless phone bill that is page after page of numbers, and an inability to categorize the time that he is spending on his clients while he is out and about or working on his mobile phone.