Via Tom comes this nugget from David Galbraith: Amazon and Ebay would be useless without an ontology that takes on Clay Shirky’s anti-metadata stance. Best quote is

“Clay Shirky is continuing to set himself up as the anti-semantic web guy. Its an easy target and good for spin. But, after all, what is anti-semantic if it isn’t meaningless.”

I tend to agree with Clay’s (and Cory Doctorow’s) basic point about metadata, but I think the task of building collaborative, bottom-up representations of perspectives and world views could play an important role in sharing knowledge
If you are still awake, this should do it: papers from the 2nd International Workshop on Evaluation of Ontology-based Tools 😉