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<div>Elias Torres has 
<a href="http://torrez.us/archives/2006/08/21/486/">announced
WP-APP</a>, a drop-in bit of PHP. (Thanks for the nod!)

 Heh, I was just going to say "Cool!" but it's turned into a
 ramble...


<a href="http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/">APP</a>, like the 
<a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt">Atom Format</a> has
emerged from the human-readable content world, its main application
domain being traditional CMSs. It's based squarely on what we know
of good practices for the web. The initial gain is getting away
from the straitjacket of RPC over HTTP, but because of the
foundations its potential goes a lot further.
A tired misconception on the Semantic Web vision is that it aims
to create something entirely new rather than supplementing (or
rather filling in missing bits) of the current web. Ok, if you view
the SemWeb as purely the RDF/OWL bits, then there may be some truth
in the belief that its an ocean-boiling exercise.
But there's a whole spectrum in between what we've got now and
that artificial vision. I've got a proper write-up tabled (in the
English sense) for an article next month, but I think APP is an
aspect of what I've been calling the content model layer. Basically
there seems to be an emerging trend from the current
document-orientation towards a more general data-orientated view of
the same material.
Independently of the Semantic Web initiative, the
machine-readability of stuff on the Web is being increased. The
metadata of Atom is essentially resource description, microformats
are bringing the description of real-world things (i.e. pure data)
to the web. More resource description. The internal models of
things like these can each be taken as domain-specific
schemas/ontologies (Atom being a generalised vocabulary for
human-readable, web-delivered content). In a sense this is a narrow
approach, there isn't an underlying fully-generalised formal model
like that of RDF. But the significance is that it's refactoring the
material we have on the web now into a data-oriented conceptual
framework. That's transparently equivalent to putting the stuff on
the Semantic Web, Semantic Web tools can use the data more-or-less
directly.
 
Sure, to get the full benefit of the Semantic Web we need a
broader range of data online in addition to human hypertexts and
social-networking specifics like calendars and address books. But
retooling to support this stuff in a way which maximises the amount
of benefit computers can offer is a big step forward. With systems
like APP, the Semantic Web is getting a huge boost 
independently of Semantic Web initiatives.
I guess the take-home is that you don't have to think about the
Semantic Web to contribute to it. For instance, as Elias put it,
you can:
<blockquote>
 Simply drop 
 <a href="http://torrez.us/code/wp-app/app.phps">app.php</a> into
 your root wordpress install directory and have some Atom/APP
 fun.
</blockquote>@en
</div>