So far 143 people whose organization already make use of controlled vocabularies answered the question “Which kind of controlled vocabulary do you use or plan to use in your applications?”.
The results so far show that lightweight models like taxonomies and thesauri are somewhat preferred over ontologies:

Taxonomies are the favorite, as 73.6% of participants use or plan to use them, followed by thesauri (62%) and ontologies (61.2%), while simple glossaries lag considerably behind with a usage of 31.4%.

This survey will close in about a week, so please take this chance to make your opinions on this topic count! You can find the questions here, it will take 5-10 minutes to answer them.

All participants will gain access to a report with the results within the following month. The most interesting results will be made public on this blog.

There have been a number of proposals for multimedia ontologies and mappings of multimedia vocabularies (cf. the excellent report from the W3C MM Semantics XG), differing in complexity and expressivity. Thus the W3C has chartered a working group to develop an ontology and API for multimedia content on the Web. The group is developing a lightweight core set of metadata properties and an API specification for accessing these properties, which may come from metadata documents in different standards. Thus mappings to many relevant standards have also been specified. The set of metadata properties will be formalized for interoperability with the Semantic Web. A W3C recommendation is expected in 2010.

Read the full interview here.

Last week I had an an encounter with a social scientist (within an academic setting) who argued that discussing the Semantic web would not make sense for him (as a social scientist), because of the present lack of social practices in that field… (*jaw-dropping*) I could not persuade him with the argument that the Linked data cloud itself was the result of a social practice – the view he had of the semantic web (which I assume was not an uneducated one) even led him to denounce that developments like Dbpedia, Twine, Revyu, or the use of metadata in general had anything to do with the Semantic Web.

And this is a big challenge.

On the one hand, it is a good thing that there are social scientists who at least have a certain notion of the Semantic Web – on the other, it seems as if all the exciting ideas and developments that have taken place in the last few years have failed to reach those who have been sensitized for the SemWeb project when the idea was first conceived. I am not meaning to make a statement about social scientists here, but rather about the need to communicate what has further happened to the original idea outside also outside of one’s own community.

Btw: In its current issue, quarterly (German-language) magazine t3n is featuring a Web 3.0 and Applied Semantic Web topic as its opener. And that is a good sign, too!