The Evaluation Group at CARET has been looking at and experimenting with MIT's Simile toolkit, as one (relatively user-friendly) way to use semantic tools for data representation and exploration. We are increasingly interested in thinking about incorporating semantic technologies into "social computing" approaches and tools.
A big advantage of Simile is that it hides a lot of the heavy-duty programming (in this case, Java) from the user, enabling easy / streamlined building of interactive web pages. A disadvantage is that the more we use it (at least until we get our own version installed!), the slower it gets, because whenever a local user loads a locally-hosted page with Simile stuff on it, the page then has to make a call on the MIT server.
