AdaptiveBlue offers AB Meta. Did the earth move for you?

AdaptiveBlue is an interesting company. Although I've not found myself using their Blue Organiser tool all that much myself, I can see which way they're pointing and I like it. Now they have announced how they wish to refresh of the old familiar META tags in the heads of web pages with their take on object-centric metadata. AB Meta (apparently developed with other web companies) is all about surfacing semantic data into the layer that we typically interact with, and that even non-tech people can hopefully author without too much trouble. From their page:

AB Meta is a simple and open format for annotating pages that are about things.

A book publisher can use AB Meta to provide information about a book such as the author and ISBN, a restaurant owner can provide information such as the cuisine, phone number and address and a movie reviewer can annotate reviews with movie titles and directors.

The format allows site owners to describe the main thing on the HTML page in a very simple way - using standard META headers. AB Meta is purposefully simple and understandable by anyone. AB Meta is based on eRDF Standard.

I'm especially interested in this "surface" expression/implementation of SW. It's clear to me that much of the running in recent times has been made by companies looking to SW-style concepts and aspirations to deliver real benefits to their business, and only in a few cases has this led to them taking a classic-ish SW path (c.f. Reuters with OpenCalais). AdaptiveBlue and many others have instead set out along the light-weight, near-the-surface route, and as an eternal optimist (for some reason), I am hopeful that this will ultimately deliver the meat that the heavy-weight, deep SW needs to do something exciting. Thus killing the chicken/egg situation, with pay-offs along the way. This was the real take-home for me of last year's SW think tank.

Whether AB Meta has a part in this for museums I can't say. It's certainly lightweight but whether it will be different enough from existing alternatives to persuade our sector to adopt it, I don't know. Perhaps the earth will yet move.

As a PS, I should add that I dropped them a line to ask about a detail (whether it would be possible to include more than one object in the head of a page) and the reply came from CEO Alex Iskold. I think that's pretty impressive: presumably he's a busy guy (and he writes a good blog post, too) and yet he took the time to reply to a pretty pedestrian inquiry.