Put things together from data, not by marking things up in RDF by hand. Don't change existing systems over to RDF immediately, but try some RDF adapters. Try combining data from existing systems that haven't been connected. Then try running rules on them, or explore the data using OWL to find relationships you may not have known before. The challenge here is to show the ‘first genuinely serendipitous associations’ of data.

A great insight in this quote from E.M. Forster that I found in a fine paper by Jon Kleinberg titled “Bursty and Hierarchical Structure in Streams.”

…there seems something else in life besides time, something which may conveniently be called ‘value’, something which is measured not by minutes or hours but by intensity, so that when we look at our past it does not stretch back evenly but piles up into a few notable pinnacles, and when we look at the future it seems sometimes a wall, sometimes a cloud, sometimes a sun, but never a chronological chart.

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927).