I was thrilled to see Greg Smith's article in MediaWeek, Web 3.0: 'Vauge, but Exciting.' For fun, I play around with semantic web software at home in my spare time. The semantic web represents the cutting edge of Internet, data, and computing and has an alphabet soup of acronyms describing the various languages and formats: RDF, OWL, SPARQL, etc. Greg's article alerted me to one I'd never heard before, SWRL, Semantic Web Rule Language. Here's the abstract of the W3C SWRL proposal:

This document contains a proposal for a Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) based on a combination of the OWL DL and OWL Lite sublanguages of the OWL Web Ontology Language with the Unary/Binary Datalog RuleML sublanguages of the Rule Markup Language. SWRL includes a high-level abstract syntax for Horn-like rules in both the OWL DL and OWL Lite sublanguages of OWL. A model-theoretic semantics is given to provide the formal meaning for OWL ontologies including rules written in this abstract syntax. An XML syntax based on RuleML and the OWL XML Presentation Syntax as well as an RDF concrete syntax based on the OWL RDF/XML exchange syntax are also given, along with several examples.

Now that's some cool stuff! A little additional research turned up a SWLR tab in the Protege tool, a SWRL query language called SQWRL, a tool called Snoogle to graphically create SWRL documents, and DLP, a complimentary/competing language to SWRL.

I have many years of fun research and experimentation ahead of me!