Recently, on his blog, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
RDF-ization is a term used by the Semantic Web community to describe the process of generating RDF from non RDF Data Sources such as (X)HTML, Weblogs, Shared Bookmark Collections, Photo Galleries, Calendars, Contact Managers, Feed Subscriptions, Wikis, and other information resource collections.
Although Idehen identifies a number of data sources, he does not explicitly identify two data sources I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with over the past few years:
- One source of data is that generated by scientific instruments. With various colleagues, the semantic framework I’ve built around this data source allows for RDF-ization of scientific data from semi-structured ASCII to XML (specifically ESML) to RDF via GRDDL. (Please see the illustration.) In principle, it should be possible to further transform the RDF representation into OWL thus resulting in what I’ve referred to elsewhere as an informal ontology. (According to Morville as well as Shadbolt et al., the RDF-ization of the data sources Idehen identifies result in folksonomies, rather than informal ontologies.) Again with various colleagues, I’ve also made use of RDF to annotate features inherent in the scientific data via XML Pointer Language (XPointer).
- Even more recently, with members of my Network Operations team at York University, I’ve been working with a relational database as a source of data on the topology of IP networks. (Please see the illustration.)
Of course, whether the motivation is personal/social-networking or scientific/IT related, the attention to RDF-ization is win-win for all stakeholders. Why? Anything that accelerates the RDF-ization of non-RDF data sources brings us that much closer to realizing the true value of the Semantic Web.
Ian Lumb's Blog 
Ian,
I assume mean data source types re. my omission? If you have live web accessible service that RDF-izes your data sources types, please just give me a ping or send some URIs.
There are more posts to come re. RDF-ization 🙂
Kingsley
Unfortunately, Kingsley, I have not (yet) made my sources accessible in the manner you describe. After reading your post, I understand the value of doing this though. Once I do, or someone else does, I will definitely let you know!
I will be looking forward to additional posts on RDF-ization.
-Ian
Hi Ian, do you know of a Toronto meetup for the semantic web, involving RDF, mircoformats, etc?
Would you be interested in such a thing? I am.
I am very interested in such a meetup, Pat. I do not, however, know of anything that already exists. Although I hope we’ll continue some of this dialogue off line (from my blog), I hope that others sharing our interest will let us know here or privately. Thanks for dropping in with this suggestion!