Today, collections of data are distributed across individuals and communities. Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments, an MIT project aims to develop tools (open source under BSD-style license) based on Semantic Web technologies for improving access, management and reuse among such distributed digital assets.
The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful "views" to a particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those views to consuming services.Here is a great example of one of the SIMILE project put to work. All M&A by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon to date.