This month’s Scientific American (Dec 2007, 297:6) features an 8 pages long article entitled The Semantic Web in Action by Feigenbaum, L. et.al.

The authors basically discuss the Semantic Web vision as laid out by Tim Berners-Lee, et.al. in the famous 2001 The Semantic Web article, and how some steps towards such a Semantic Web have been made.

In it, they define the semantic web as

A set of formats and languages that find and analyze data on the World Wide Web, allowing consumers and businesses to understand all kinds of useful online information.

A tad general perhaps, but anyways… On the technology front, RDF/OWL and some uses and applications of these technologies, like FAOF, is mentioned, while a few use cases are discussed.

Although the use cases are interesting, the authors fail to even mention Topic Maps as a semantic web technology, and limit the technological discussion to RDF/OWL alone, stating that “The data language, called Resource Description Language (RDF)…” (emphasis added).

As an example on the use of semantic technologies, the article mentions Harper’s Magazine:

Harper’s Magazine has harnessed semantic ontologies on its Web site to present annotated timelines of current events that are automatically linked to articles about concepts related to those events.

Although it’s a good looking feature — and probably the best use of RDF I’ve ever seen on Web portals — this kind of thing must’ve been done by dozens of topic maps driven portals, and is not exactly revolutionary compared to the wide-spread use of associative linking of concepts in Topic Maps driven portals.

Another — just as good, and wide-spread — example of semantic web technologies in action, is how online portals like www.government.no use Topic Maps to deliver powerful search and filtering of search results for end-users, by structuring articles, documents, etc. using a semantic technology, or how public/governmental portals like Norge.no and www.bergen.kommune.no can make use of a shared vocabulary (on the latter site represented in a topic map) for common terms/concepts.

Not to mention, the way in which one can build sites where, due to the associative nature of the Topic Maps technology, the user wont find himself stuck in a dead-end. (I also hope we’ll see more of the natural language processing / TM search soon).

Topic Maps is most definitively in “semantic use” by companies such as the US DoE, Nokia, and many more.

Further, following the authors’ definition of the semantic web, Topic Maps does certainly enable consumers and businesses to understand all kinds of useful online information in new and more powerful ways … in areas as diverse as web portals, biomedical research, and semantic tagging (see e.g. program and abstracts @ TMRA 2007).

Therefore, it strikes me as odd that the authors don’t even mention the technology — not even in a note.