I’m a frequent reader of Nova Spivack’s [LINK] (although still not in the Twine Beta *sniff* [LINK]) and I have a big interest in the Semantic Web, or at least what it promises. My one foray into this was the Degrees of Separation RDF generator and web service [LINK] built on top of ClearForest’s semantic services. Here’s a sample of the connection between Toshiba and Yahoo as per the "blog-o-sphere".
(click to view)

and the corresponding RDF:
http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees/rdf.aspx?&startTag=Toshiba&endTag=Yahoo!
or Australia & Dell (click to view)

http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees/rdf.aspx?&startTag=Australia&endTag=Dell

So little did I know that IRELAND was at the bleeding edge of this next chapter of the internet and is in fact leading the charge in research.

Nova’s recent post describes his visit to DERI in Galway, Ireland [LINK] and all the interesting things he saw there. Some note-worthy items are…

"Semantic Reality. …perhaps one of the most eye-opening demos I saw at DERI, is the Semantic Reality project. They are using semantics to integrate sensors with the real world. They are creating an infrastructure that can scale to handle trillions of sensors eventually. Among other things I saw, you can ask things like "where are my keys?" and the system will search a network of sensors and show you a live image of your keys on the desk where you left them, and even give you a map showing the exact location. The service can also email you or phone you when things happen in the real world that you care about — for example, if someone opens the door to your office, or a file cabinet, or your car, etc. Very groundbreaking research that could seed an entire new industry."

"Semantic Web Services.  One of the big opportunities for the Semantic Web that is often overlooked by the media is Web services. Semantics can be used to describe Web services so they can find one another and connect, and even to compose and orchestrate transactions and other solutions across networks of Web services, using rules and reasoning capabilities. Think of this as dynamic semantic middleware, with reasoning built-in."

Seems Ireland is still living up to its history as "The island of Saints and Scholars" (although there’s less evidence for the former).