The problem

The major problem that people have been trying to tackle is that although RDF itself is fairly simple, the language that is usually used to express it is not. RDF is usually 'carried' via RDF/XML which is renowned for its difficulty.

The reason this is such an important issue is that a great deal of the web's metadata resides in HTML pages sitting on web-sites. Company addresses, the weather in Tokyo, the price of a second-hand car...every day millions of pieces of metadata are placed onto the internet which are not usable in software since they are not formatted in any standardised way. Without some kind of mechanism for extracting this information the dream of the Semantic Web will remain just that--a dream.

What's needed is not to throw away RDF, but to find an easier way of encoding it that allows the output of HTML authors to be placed at the centre of the Semantic Web.