In case you missed it Danny Ayers has a fun interview with Richard Cyganiak who is one of the prime movers behind the Linking Open Data Project of Semantic Web Education and Outreach Group at the W3C, and authors of Cool URIs for the Semantic Web and How to Publish Linked Data on the Web. Among other things you’ll learn some details about sindice (the semantic web search engine at DERI) which indexes (using Solr!) structured data like rdf/xml, microformats (I never noticed last.fm had microformat content) and (soon) rdfa from the world wild web. More details about Sindice can be found in an earlier podcast Paul Miller did with Eyal Oren (also at DERI).

Richard’s perspective on the past and future of the semantic web is particularly refreshing. Rather than hard selling SPARQL or even RDF his attitude seems to be to try what works now, while recognizing that the technologies that make the semantic web work may very well be different in a few years. Also there’s an interesting discussion of microformats and RDF, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both. Plus there is a fun side story to the LOD diagram that shows the links between various open data sets.

If you’ve ever wanted to hear more about linked-data from someone in the know now is your chance. Nice questions danja!