In my experience, there is not a real use case for RDF or the other Semantic Web standards. You always have to write domain specific code to actually drive an application with RDF - so why not ditch RDF and write a domain specific data store too? How does RDF contribute, if it neither automatically drives any part of your application, or facilitates linking or relating of mulltiple datasets?
They are not all flops. There are some MMO social environments that are huge, especially outside the US. Kids like it. Habbo.com for instance has many millions of users, mostly from Finland and the UK.
It probably doesn't help that books on the subject have desperately unhip titles like "Enterprise Integration Patterns". The introduction to that book is actually a great essay on when and how to use asynchronous messaging, and it is online here: http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/Introduction.ht...
AMQP is very interesting. Check it out if you are building a distributed system or if you have a requirement for reliable asynchronous messaging. When I last looked into it about a year ago, the implementations (all two of them that I found - apache qpid and rabbitmq) were still a little rough but it looks like a lot has happened.
It's wierd how few people in the web world are aware of asynchronous messaging.
Can I point out that this explanation did not identify a root cause? How was the corrupt message originally produced?
If they know how it happened, it's not reflected in this article. The solution they describe addresses the detection of and recovery from future mysterious occurrences rather than identifying, understanding and eliminating whatever bug or condition caused this one.
This guy expresses the problem well: http://inamidst.com/whits/2008/ditching