Now The Chronicle of Higher Education is getting hip to the idea of a Semantic Web, reporting on Tim Berners-Lee's new vision of including metadata using XML in databases to facilitate searching and collating of data. The W3C is a good spot for additional information and resources on the Semantic Web.

Personally, I think there's going to be a difficult time coming up with Universal Resource Identifiers that all interested parties will agree on. For example, it will be difficult to mediate the approaches of commercial interests with the thinking of librarians in information science. It's probably a good thing, then, that the World Wide Web's progenitor is involved in the discussion. Perhaps people will look to Berners-Lee for leadership.