Timo Hannay of Nature Publishing Group is interviewed in New Scientist in the 31 May issue. (Article seems impossible to access online at the moment, due to slow New Scientist website.)

“I was a big proponent of the semantic web a few years back,” says Timo Hannay, who runs the web publishing team at Nature Publishing Group in London. Now Hannay and others say the languages developed by the W3C to describe data semantically are just too complex for many website owners.
Web developers and users may instead turn to simpler semantic systems, such as the metadata tags already used to describe shared bookmarks on sites like del.icio.us. While these tags do help computers find the right data, they can limit the potential for mash-ups. If a blogger only uses the tag “San Francisco” to describe reviews of restaurants in that city, for example, that will not help users wanting details of particular kinds of eatery in specific neighbourhoods. “We’re seeing the semantic web emerge,” says Hannay. “It’s just messier than we’d hoped.”

What’s the London connection? Er, well, Timo is based in London, and so is New Scientist. And I thought the article was interesting.