The vision of Semantic Web is that machine usable data on the web is revolutionizing the usage of the worldwide web. It embraces the generation and retrieval of freely available, semi-structured and related data (Linked Data). Intelligent agents are able to use this data for decisions and distributed systems integrate them from miscellaneous sources in a cost-effective way
Data.gov launched in May this year to make huge data sets of information from federal agencies available in machine-readable formats. While incredibly valuable, these data sets are not particularly useful in their current format to anyone but researchers, statisticians, sociologists, developers, or others used to parsing databases searching for trends.
The essential benefit of hNews is that by identifying content more clearly and making more of its key information machine-readable it therefore becomes easier to search for. It also could lead to the development of different ways to search via different applications. Kasi was enthusiastic about the advantages of this for the AP. "AP clearly believes that being able to better identify each piece of content for better search discovery, better linking, better aggregation allows ultimately for the customer to see more content, more trusted content, from editorial sources," he said. "Microformats are a very simple, elegant way to do that on a pretty large scale basis," he added, allowing the AP to "prime the content better for search purposes even before it gets to the publisher."
My first experiment with OpenCalais involved OpenOffice. I use OpenOffice intensively (as a direct replacement for the Microsoft Office line of shovelware), and although OpenOffice (like Office) has more than its fair share of annoyances, it also has some features that are just plain crazy-useful, such as support for Macros written in any of four languages (Python, Basic, beanshell, and JavaScript). The JavaScript binding is particularly useful, since it's implemented in Java and allows you to tap the power of the JRE. But I'm getting ahead of myself.