FOAF is irrelevant in many respects, I'll give you that; but, RDF certainly does exist outside of academic toys. Big names that I know of that use/publish RDF:

FOAF is irrelevant in many respects, I'll give you that; but, RDF certainly does exist outside of academic toys. Big names that I know of that use/publish RDF: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/07/the_world_cup_and_a_call_to_ac.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/07/the_world_cup... http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/RDF http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/RDF http://richard.cyganiak.de/blog/2009/10/linked-data-at-the-new-york-times-exciting-but-buggy/ http://richard.cyganiak.de/blog/2009/10/linked-data-at-the-n... http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/SciVerse-Hub-Application-Connects-Researchers-With-US-Government-Datasets-72876.asp http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/SciVerse-Hub-Appl... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evri http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evri [EDIT] Don't forget DBpedia and FreeBase (which uses RDF heavily) is used heavily by PowerSet which subsequently was bought by Microsoft which now (as far as I know) is used heavily for Bing.