Okay, we've got RDF, we've got OWL, we've got Jena, we've got ontologies. Now what? What can we do with them? Let's take the semweb for a spin.

In Sanibel, I did lots of brainstorming with folks. Seemed like most there were hunting elephants: big grants and big business. My focus was on a different market: the small and the many. Horizontal markets are harder to reach; you gotta really know marketing. It's not just board rooms you're pitching to... it's everyone.

So what semweb products could succeed with the many? Well, there's my own company's products, which I'll talk about later. Then there's the talent search idea. But in all the Sanibel talks, the one example domain I brought up most was real estate. If someone came to me today and asked, "How can I make money in this space?," that's what I'd tell them. Real estate could very well be the "killer domain" for the semantic web.

A few days before the conference, we'd put my mother's house on the market. We'd just finished our final walkthrough with our real estate agent, who then put the house in the local MLS system. In quiet moments at the conference, I imagined some happy couple finding their dream house (my mom's house) and just how that might happen.

There's of course centralized website databases, such as Realtor.com and RealEstate.com. But the real estate market is essentially a many-to-many marketplace, which thrives best when the buyer and seller can be as specific as possible. To me, this is a job for ontologies and semweb brokering systems. There's already some efforts at datasharing in this space, but I think we're just scratching the surface.

More on this tomorrow.