I am sitting in a meeting room at work and watching our CTO Ian Davis bring the semantic web to life.
Clipper uses javascript ‘recognisers’ to spot properties and classes in RDF data returned from queries. So if Clipper sees a pair of lat/long coordinates, it shows a map. If the results of a search also include some map data? The recognisers are already there and they just show the points on a map.
So, people introduce new ontologies that describe things. Other people write ‘widgets’ that know what to do with certain properties. If the people who write the ontologies re-use properties that other people have written widgets for, then half the work of visualising the data in the new ontology has been done.
It lives.