The deal is officially done per the Powerset blog. The community was correct. --The Industry Standard

Coming out of the recent Semantic Technology Conference, there continues to be a lot of chatter about how 2008 is the year that the Sementic Web will finally come into its own. What used to exist solely in the realm of R&D and academia is now producing a steady stream of startups, and an acquisiton in this space would surely put semantic technologies on the front burner after almost two years of hype. This is all the more likely now that major players like Oracle and Yahoo have some real skin in the game.

This is a prediction that at least one Semantic Web startup company will be acquired this year. Now, granted what counts as "Semantic Web" and "startup" is a point of dicussion at best. Generally speaking, semantic technologies at the very least make use of the W3C open standard RDF, though there are a few rogue examples that we can think of that don't use RDF but would still in our minds qualify. This is futher complicated by the fact that marketers are tossing the term "semantic" around with reckless abandon. We'll solve this issue by using our own discretion, using the Wikipedia definition as our guide, and will consult an independant industry analyst if neccessary. We're also defining "startup" as a company having a product, at least in private beta, for at least 3 months, but not more than 3 years and six months. If the acquired company has multiple products, some of them involving semantic technologies and some of them not, it is the semantic technology-related product(s) that must meet the above qualification around availability in order to trigger favorable judgement.

Question or concerns? Need for clarification? Speak up below in the comments before you place your bets, and we'll get right back to you.