Yesterday two seminars took place at University of Rome, Tor Vergata, Computer System Engineering department. The talks were held by Yorick Wilks (head of the NLP research group at University of Sheffield) and Sergei Nirenburg (University of Maryland Baltimore County). Main topics were: information retrieval and extraction, ontological semantics, Semantic Web and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Some excellent points were made out, and a lively discussion about whether the Semantic Web will ever go mainstream, and about where actually semantics are in the Semantic Web derived from the talks. What emerged soon, anyway, was the crucial role NLP is playing – and will play – in the development of a machine-understandable web.
Whatever… I’d like to see such events take place more often in my faculty. Very interesting. 
The Semantic Web is such an interesting discussion. I’m trusting Tim Berners-Lee and W3C on this, and also what to make of this. Interesting to keep track of his blog, definitely a recommendation: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4
Thanks a lot newmw. TBL’s blog is in my blogroll too
Haha, yeah, now I see! Well, it’s nice anyways