The Semantic Web Meetup happens at MIT in Cambridge, MA occasionally: https://www.meetup.com/The-Cambridge-Semantic-Web-Meetup-Group/ https://www.meetup.com/The

The Semantic Web Meetup happens at MIT in Cambridge, MA occasionally: https://www.meetup.com/The-Cambridge-Semantic-Web-Meetup-Group/ https://www.meetup.com/The-Cambridge-Semantic-Web-Meetup-Gro... Though it seems mostly cancelled / sporadic now, it had a lot of interesting people presenting on interesting academic uses of the semantic web / RFD / etc. A couple times I was there Tim Berners-Lee himself was there too. He's an interesting guy to meet. Overall though, I think due to business reasons (really companies are not incentivized to share) it has mostly caught on in academia. With a shining example in "microformats" which gained adoption because companies like Google adopted them as a way to make gathering (as opposed to sharing) data. Edit: Personally I found a lot of aspects useful but others not all that well thought out when it comes to practical specs. The community has a tendency to try to build complete taxonomies rather than taxonomies that have long term usability. As a result they become stale. For example, Friend of a Friend (FOAF) [1] is nice but it is very narrowly speced in some areas but not others. For example, there is a tag for AOL Instant Messenger ID but none for Facebook. Microformats in a way has some similar issues though not as bad. [1] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/