Web developers use microformats to get out of the Semantic Web starting gate. True technological paradigm shifts don’t happen easily. There’s always the challenge of getting from here to there. The IT industry has typically referred to this as the “installed base” problem, and it represents as thorny an issue for new development concepts as it does for actual products. This has been one of the issues standing in the way of more rapid enterprise adoption of the Semantic Web.

Most of us are familiar with the Protege-OWL editor as a widely-used visualization tool for ontologies.  Recently, a new tool called OwlSight was released from the consulting firm of Clark & Parsia , a small cadre of engineers and researchers with ties to the Universities of Maryland and Manchester.