Gathering some more information about the Semantic Web idea. These links are from Clay Shirky's very critical article on the topic: a Scientific American article by Tim Berners-Lee et al. which is one of the key publications on the topic, an excerpt from Berners-Lee's book Weaving the Web, and the Semantic Web Roadmap at the W3C.
Incidentally, there is a critique of Shirky's article as well.
