I'm a scruffy

I’m at a (very good) tutorial on semantic web at the WWW 2007 meeting in Banff. In the first session there was a key slide from Garole Goble on the different axes – semantics and web. Putting both of these together hasn’t yet happened. Full semantics – OWL, etc require a supported community – either a large corporation or an enlightened public discipline such as bioscience, healthcare, astronomy. They have invested in semantic technologies – ontologies, decision making, formal workflows, resource discovery, etc. (slide 21) The other axis is web – where we get a bottom-up approach of folksonomies, tagging, blogosphere, etc. (Formal chemistry is zero semantics and zero web, of course, since most formal organisation compete rather than collaborate). So the main development is along the web axis, which Carole labels the “scruffies”.
I’m proud to be a scruffy (I even practice it IRL).
So I asked Sean Bechhofer, – who gave the first presentation – what the scruffies could do in semantics. A fairly simple idea jumped out for creating a bottom-up semantics independent of publishers and other organisations, which I’ll probably take forward on the Blue Obelisk list. But here I’d like to know what other communities have done in creating bottom-up semanatics. Sean gave the example of conferences on Semantics which have created a simple schema for describing a conference – taking away all the pictorial garbage from the websites and simply giving the basic facts in semantic form – name, place, dates, etc. This is simple, with high appeal and easily implementable. Any other ideas?