I cover the semantic web (also called Web 3.0, the linked data universe, etc.) for Semanticweb.com, and sometimes it's hard to know where we are in its evolution. There are a lot of stories about standards and about what small companies or researchers are doing, but you often can't see the forest for the trees.

Thankfully, along came my Jupitermedia colleague Dan Muse, quoting, who else, Ferris Bueller. Dan shakes it up, baby, interviewing two semantic web luminaries -- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor James Hendler and OpenLink Software CEO Kingsley Idehen -- and they put the size of the semantic web forest in perspective, and what kind of fertilizer it needs to grow, how much sunshine (and I'm growing tired of this growth metaphor).

Dan's story comes a week before the start of the LinkedData Planet Conference in New York. Here's a sample of the questions and answers in the article:

Q. When someone interested in exploring the Semantic Web first starts looking around, he or she might find himself/herself facing a collection of unfamiliar technologies that seem to make it harder to produce "good" content and that concern themselves with unfamiliar concepts like "ontologies" and "knowledge domains."

James Hendler: When people first started to learn about the Web they needed to learn about "hyperlinks" and "markup." Web 2.0 developers have to learn about Ajax, services, and social network mathematics. Each new Web technology brings new things with it and the leading developers push these forward, with others learning after. Should Web 3.0 be any different?