A couple of sudden insights stirred my interest in the semantic web a couple years ago, first that it potentially could transform the web into one large database and second the fact that its graph structure is perfect for network analysis. Regarding the latter, it was at the time there was a sudden interest in network analysis, popularized a little later by Albert-László Barabási and Duncan J. Watts, among others.
At the time I had two interns exploring some of the technologies to put to use in an educational context, most notably data visualization techniques (as a way to make sense of large quantities of semantic data) and ways to use the web as a database (creating open world applications). Using the wider web of course because a student's learning environment doesn't end at institutionalized borders. Two things quickly became apparent; data visualization is hard and creating open world applications is hard.
Still, the initial ideas have never left me and I'd like to be doing some stuff again, just to keep a feel with developments. It will be interesting to see what 2008 will bring, a lot is happening. Twine, Calais and Hakia are just a couple making some waves recently and I wouldn't be surprised to see more services based on semantic web technology going live this year.
To get going again I've created a port for Habari of Benjamin Nowack's ARC2 Wordpress Extension ("RDF Tools") to have an easy SPARQL endpoint to play with. Just like the Wordpress version, this plugin will add a standalone RDF store with SPARQL functionality to Habari, configurable via the admin panel. I still need to find the best place to park packages, in the meantime download it from here.
I love to see "third party" Habari plugins come crawling out of the woodwork! I'll give it a test run and see if I can figure out what on earth this really is. :)
I found a very small "bug" when I tried installing it though. In the plugin description that says "Requires the ARC Toolkit", there is a missing 't' in the link so it renders as htp:// not http://
Thanks for spotting this! I forgot to mention in the post that you'll need a recent svn checkout for it to work.
Got it installed now. For some reason I get an error when trying to configure it claiming that the sitemap plugin timed out. Weird, but if I disable the sitemap plugin I can configure your RDF Tool. No idea why that happens though.
Anyway, got it running now. I have no idea what to do with it though. :)
I just tried the sitemap plugin, but unfortunately can't reproduce your issue. As for using the plugin, see the specification for an overview and samples. See also dbpedia for the potential, but of course you could start small and see if you can load your weblog into the RDF store first :)