As a way of staking its leadership in the area, Oracle announced yesterday that over 100 commercial and open source applications are using its semantic Web technology. (Click here for a semantic Web tutorial.)

Here’s how it works: developers build Java extensions to their applications, which use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) format to store data in Oracle Database 10g. RDF is natively supported by 10g.

It makes sense that Oracle would lay claim to the semantic Web — according to an article in Computerworld, “The Semantic Web is about giving users the ability to manipulate, connect and associate Web resources in new and powerful ways. It’s a capability similar to that of the corporate workhorse, the relational database. The Semantic Web is about taking the relational database and ‘webbing it.’” According to Oracle’s own “Semantic Technology Center” Web page, “Semantic Technologies are designed to extend the capabilities of information on the Web and enterprise systems to be networked in meaningful ways.”

It may be up for debate whether the Oracle DBMS is truly “relational,” but clearly, Oracle’s party line is that it is, so naturally the company feels fit to apply these same principles to the Internet, bringing us a little closer to the vision of Web 2.0.

Click here to listen to a podcast interview with Jim Murphy of AMR Research about Oracle’s Web 2.0 aspirations. Oracle is betting that blogs, wikis and related emerging technologies will profoundly change the enterprise. Murphy talks about the new WebCenter Suite, how SAP and IBM are approaching Web 2.0 and more.

-Elisa