Semantic annotation capabilities embedded within publishing platforms is necessary (but not sufficient) for semantic web adoption to reach its tipping point.  We already have Semantic Mediawiki extension for semantic wikis, Wordpress RDFa plugin for annotated blogging, and a recent paper in ACM Communications from Microsoft Research titled “A ‘Smart’ Cyberinfrastructure for research” discusses add-in support within Microsoft Word for semantic annotations first announced in March 2009 and available from CodePlex.  Drupal bundles RDFa annotations within its Content Management System (CMS) as a core, out-of-the-box feature.  Bundling semantic annotation out-of-the-box is key to widespread adoption; community plugins/extensions like Semantic Mediawiki and Wordpress RDFa plugin will not lead to the same level of user adoption as publishers of semantic content, thereby not fully realizing the potential on the consumer side of semantic technologies.  I anticipate other publishing platforms will follow their lead, first with a community extension available for semantic annotation and then working the capability into the roadmap to become a core feature.  I wonder how long until a semantic annotation capability exists within PDF?  This 2007 paper “An Annotation Tool for Semantic Documents” demonstrates a Protege ontology editor plugin that allows users to semantically annotate PDF documents.

Some companies publish RDF already (see Good Relations ontology for e-commerce, BestBuy publishes its store information and inventory as RDF) but this practice won’t become more widespread until e-commerce sites are at a competitive disadvantage to NOT publish RDF of their inventory.

In terms of the research community eating its own semantic web dogfood, I think Semantically Annotated LaTeX holds a lot of promise, as I would expect Computer Science and related scientific disciplines to be the earliest adopters, but I guess the bioinformatics field already has them beat.

As a case in point, I plan to add Wordpress RDFa extension to this blog as soon as I get around to it.