RDF is the technology behind schema.org, so that would be a good success story. There are quite a bunch of companies working around RDF based technologies, like TopQuadrant, StarDog, Ontotext, and more. But if you want to start playing with it, I recommend you start with Jena/Fuseki [1], it is super easy to run.
Example: say your database contains a note about "doves", and another one about, say, "seagulls". Later, you can search for things you have written about birds, and the query would find both your notes about doves and seagulls (something that you wouldn't be able to do with a fulltext search). There's a whole world of things you can do with inference, so using RDF is a no brainer when it comes to finding relationships between things. It also makes it trivial to import knowledge annotated by other ppl.
If you are interested, here are some other resources I found useful to get started:
This is book is old but Chapter 2 and 3 are a good intro on "machine-readable meaning" and Inference. The author also has another cool book on "collective intelligence" I still haven't worked through yet :-)
Example: say your database contains a note about "doves", and another one about, say, "seagulls". Later, you can search for things you have written about birds, and the query would find both your notes about doves and seagulls (something that you wouldn't be able to do with a fulltext search). There's a whole world of things you can do with inference, so using RDF is a no brainer when it comes to finding relationships between things. It also makes it trivial to import knowledge annotated by other ppl.
If you are interested, here are some other resources I found useful to get started:
* http://www.learningsparql.com/
A great book about SPARQL, a query language for RDF data.
* http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596153823.do
"Programming the Semantic Web"
This is book is old but Chapter 2 and 3 are a good intro on "machine-readable meaning" and Inference. The author also has another cool book on "collective intelligence" I still haven't worked through yet :-)
* http://www.bobdc.com/blog/reification-is-a-red-herring/
How to model "property graphs" with RDF. You'll stumble upon this question at some point :-)
[1]: https://jena.apache.org/documentation/fuseki2/fuseki-run.htm...