The next generation of the web, this Semantic Web, is in its infancy but already we’re seeing some fantastic glimpses of its potential.

We saw some of that potential recently at DrupalCon 2008 where Dries Buytaert used his keynote to share a vision of the future… one that is built on RDF (read more on our sister blog).

Imagine every Drupal installation as a Linked Data source. Wow!

This would be a massive step towards the Semantic Web’s maturation and I hope the Drupal people can pull it off. My advice would be to remember that these are still early days and to tackle it with pragmatic baby steps. Just like the early days of the Web there’ll be plenty of stop energy trying to drag you back, but hold your nerve and see it through.

Adoption of the technologies by significant projects like Drupal really shows that we’re entering a new generation of the Web, one that is much more data-centric. The few billion triples online right now are just a drop in the ocean of what we’ll need for a useful Semantic Web so this news from Drupal is hugely important.

It feels like the Web did back when being able to launch a website on Geocities was a liberating experience. There wasn’t much to link to back then either but fifteen years later the Web is unrecognisable in terms of its diversity and effect on the World. I’m willing to bet that in another decade it will have changed again way beyond our expectations and predictions today.

The best is yet to come.