Certainly there are niche applications, in taxonomy design for example, but there is no tidal wave of change. Search is the application with most to gain from semantics (because it enables rich snippets), but the major search engines have abandoned RDF in favor of simpler, easier to use technology.

So, what does this mean for publishers? Firstly, semantics are still vitally important – it’s still critical to produce high quality content and metadata. There is no substitute for building a carefully designed XML workflow. This will ensure that semantic markup and metadata can be delivered to search engines and other downstream partners effectively. This also ensures you have the necessary foundation for maximum usability and discoverability for users within your site.

But it also means that we can lay to rest many of the technical questions around RDF, triples, inference engines, OWL and other esoterica. There are some parts of the semantic technology stack that I think are still very interesting and I’ll be talking about these more in a future post. But for now it clear that XML workflows will deliver what you need to participate fully in the the ecology of search. And henceforth we can lay to rest the Web 3.0 which never happened.