the chemical semantic web has arrived! just do it NOW

I have been overwhelmed with excitement about the new maturity of semantic technology and RDF data that is available for our construction of the chemical semantic web. Note that I used to write “Chemical Semantic Web” with the assumption that it had to use the whole paraphernalia of the Semantic Web. But – as a newly discovered “scruffy” – I now know that we only need lightweight – very lightweight – approaches and this is usually labelled as the “lowercase semantic web”. So, from now on, I’ll probably write “csw”.
The vision is simple – make everything a URI and use RDF to support searches using the modern generation of tools. We’ve had several sessions – some under the theme “Linking Data” The first contained tutorial material; the second – at which TBL and others demonstrated examples and vision blew away all my scepticism.
Tim’s message was simple – don’t hang around – just do it NOW! Unfortunately I don’t have any material to hand and will have to rely on memory. But I have no doubt that we have the chance to transform the world of chemical information within months. And remember that we can now start using machines to help.
There’s a huge amount of tools! and I am still struggling to know which to use. And some of the terminology (from ontoworld):

A SPARQL endpoint is a conformant SPARQL protocol service as defined in the SPROT specification. A SPARQL endpoint enables users (human or other) to query a knowledge base via the SPARQL language. Results are typically returned in one or more machine-processable formats. Therefore, a SPARQL endpoint is mostly conceived as a machine-friendly interface towards a knowledge base. Both the formulation of the queries and the human-readable presentation of the results should typically be implemented by the calling software, and not be done manually by human users.

So from what I can see

• we find a URI (derefenceable) linked to a set of RDF that we are interested in (e.g. “chempedia”)
• point it at an endpoint (e.g. tabulator)

and then issue a query.
I’m probably wrong, but I’ll know more tomorrow. At least I am doing it NOW!