Semantic web is easy

I just read Dan Zombonini's post The 7 flaws of the semantic web, which is a good critique of the Semantic Web (big S, big W). It doesn't throw much new light on it's flaws but it does gather them together and put forward a very coherent argument. While I disagree vehemently, rather than writing an incoherent rebuttal, I'd like to tackle one point of his in a concrete manner. [I've already written a rebuttal in attempting to write an introduction - for concreteness see RDF in a nutshell]

He writes

Web 2.0 applications are pretty easy to build, because most people can pick up the base technologies really quickly - HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript. You can then take a little step up to learn about DHTML and AJAX, and then use these to build a Web 2.0 application.

With the semantic web, there’s a much higher first rung to the ladder. Getting to grips with RDF/XML, SPARQL, and the other core technologies is a big ask for most developers. To then get useful semantic web applications out of these takes a couple more exhausting jumps of complexity.

First off his diagram is misleading, he has neatly folded the bottom layers of the stack into one layer, so his comment "there's a much higher first rung to the ladder is misleading". Lokking at TimBL's version of the stack, the bottom rung is URI's, technically a difficult topic, but one most developers (and even non-developers) have some familiarity with.

The next rung is xml, again something which is well deployed and reasonably well understood by developers at large.
Developers can contibute to the semantic web, by simply using URI's, especially if the URI's follow web conventions ie. expose RESTful interfaces. Even if you don't use any of the other layers in the stack, using URI's gives your resources a presence on the Semantic Web, the more URI's you use the more useful your data is, in a Semantic Web way. For example, the rss fragment (written as rdf)

http://www.news.com/news-story has a http://www.metadata.com/property/subject of “Science/Nature”

can be written

http://www.news.com/news-story has a http://www.metadata.com/property/subject of http://technorati.com/tag/Science&Nature

This makes the data more useful, allowing for example,and aggregator to combine this data with other data that is about Science and Nature. To make this happen the author didn't need to know anything about the semantic web other than URI's are better.
Similarly using xml makes your data, more useful on the Semantic Web (the advantage in this case is that it is easier to transform your data into other data formats eg. using Atom means your data can be transformed to rss1.0 and parsed by an rdf parser, or transformed to html to be read through a web browser).

The second rung in the ladder is the RDF model, this rung is where the good stuff happens, but is the realm of the semantic web developer, not the developer-at-large. RDF is not difficult (though the RDF/XML syntax is ugly and is what puts most developers off), the intended aim of this post was to demonstrate that, instead I got way-laid. To see why RDF is easy, see RDF in a Nutshell

With the semantic web, there’s a low first rung to the ladder. To get useful semantic web data, developers only need to use XML and URI's. To then build useful semantic web applications developers can rely on RDF, SPARQL, and the other higher-level technologies.