Eventually I found someone that is able to explain in human readable language what SPARQL is, which role it plays in the semantic web arena, and the potential outcomes of merging it with Web 2.0 applications.

I’m referring to the O’Reilly article by Clark Kendall. He is able to create such a promising atmosphere that after the final sentence

Frankly, I’m starting to catch the scent of one of those big convergence things just possibly starting to happen. It smells like money!

you are tempted to jump on the chair and “start something” mashing up Ajax and SPARQL. But then you remember that SPARQL means RDF and RDF means a complex, hard to grasp data representation formalism.

Nonetheless Clark Kendall is calling all the developers of Web 2.0 applications and services to wrap “an RDF interface around their data” so that queries can be run across different applications and services, with very little efforts, just

two if-statements in Python and three SPARQL queries

Frankly, I’m starting to catch that simple formats and freedom to play with data will always win over complex formalism where everybody have to agree on 50 page drafts written by technical committees.

But maybe I’m just scared by RDF because of my huge ignorance and I should trust more competent and optimistic people like: Danny Ayers, Sonu Kapoor, Leo Sauermann and Tim Bray.