Re: "State of the Semantic Web" - personal opinions?

Have you taken a look at the capabilities that Intellidimension provides in their Semantic SDK?  It is a set of .NET libraries and Visual Studio extensions that greatly simplify Semantic Web development on the Microsoft .NET platform.

They are one of our partners in this space and we are actively engaging Intellidimension around the development of these libraries.  I recently presented with Geoff the CEO at the Semantic Technology conference in San Jose.

My experience is that Geoff and his team are very reactive and open to user/customer feedback.  I'm sure he will reply with some more details but definitely check out the libraries at their website: http://www.intellidimension.com/

Best Regards,
Eric Schoonover
Solutions Architect
Microsoft Corporation


This message in response to:

I chatted with Danny a while back, but I think it is worth putting my

tuppence in to the thread.



I develop for the Windows platform using .NET



Like it or not (and I know that many in the SemWeb community probably

don't care much for MS) this is where huge amounts of LoB development

gets done.



I am a huge fan of the semantic web 'promise' (also of REST, fwiw). My

problem is that there are no 'first-class' libraries out there for use

by .NET developers (especially those who are not experts in semantic

technologies).



Yes, there is SemWeb [1]. But although it is the nearest to being

useful, it is not 'first class' (and I mean Joshua Tauberer no offence

in saying this).



Yes, there is Redland [2]. The problem is that the windows binaries

have not maintained since before the dinosaurs (correction: April

2006) and unless you are a C++ guru I don't fancy your chances.



Yes, I could write my own library ... but I'm insufficiently expert on

semantic technologies to do so and, besides, I want to ship end-user

functionality - not core libraries.



The truth, however unpalatable, is that unless MS or another big beast

ships a library / framework that the .NET community can rely upon and

learn from then the number of business apps employing semantic

technologies will remain small.



I do not wish to sound like a doomsayer. On the contrary, I fervently

hope that we will get .NET framework support - it's just it feels like

we are in the Dark Ages right now. If I am incorrect, and there is

such a library already, I would be overjoyed to be proven wrong.



[1] http://razor.occams.info/code/semweb/

[2] http://librdf.org/



Regards,

Alan Dean

http://thoughtpad.net/alan-dean