By early May 2003, it is expected that the current revising of RDF by the W3C RDF Core working group will be substantially completed (at Last Call working draft stage at this date). The Web Ontology working group producing the OWL Web Ontology Language from earlier DAML+OIL work, based on RDF will also likely have completed its main technical work, so this would be a good time to explain the current W3C work. This update will cover at that date what has been changed from earlier developments based on implementation feedback, an outline of the state of the current and imminent publications as well as an overview of the W3C Semantic Web activity.

An outline will be given of the state of the active research activity including the SWAD work in Europe and US, RDF Query and Calendaring task forces, the ongoing coordination of RDF and XML in various areas such as XML schema datatypes, schema annotation and with Web Services such as WS Choreography.

Finally the update will describe some of the latest semantic web applications in development that should include at least the following: self-described personal information (FOAF), flexible and simple syndication (RSS 1.0), semantic web links with webloging (pings, trackback, RSS), description of real world locations (spacenamespace, GeoURL, related to events).