The Web 2.0 concept is all the rage and Tim O’Rielly has a good high-level article on it: What Is Web 2.0 — Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. I like his comment about why it’s important to come to an understanding about what underlies the new generation of successful web applications.

“But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as “Web 1.0″ and another as “Web 2.0″? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications.”

While the use of RDF is not part of the consensus Web 2.0 model, I think it will develop a key role, at least for some classes of web applications. One of the Web 2.0 slogans is “Data is the Next Intel Inside”. The current consensus Web 2.0 model makes use of data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT and asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest and that will pave the way for use of RDF. POXML (Plain Old XML) is ok for many narrow applications, but more sophisticated data rich ones, especially those that cooperate with and share information with other web applications, will benefit from RDF.

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