Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

I remember his AAAI '07 talk where he laid into the audience for changing and reusing URLs. It made me really want to see this world he was imagining where millions of people using the web every which way agree to universally abide by a rule that makes their life a lot harder but makes it easier to reason about algorithms on the Web.

Btw, I don't think this or failure of semantic web reflect badly on TBL. He is in a rare class of folks, along with Stallman, who can leave a bigger dent in the world while missing their ideals by a mile than most of is could if we got everything we wanted.

Blogger/blogspot and RSS. We already had it, and still have it. It's not as pretty as Instagram, though. It's all over.

For the same reason graphical programming languages are still unpoular, and the command line still rules: inputting normalized tags is many orders of magnitude harder than typing free text. Even on an adaptive touch interface. Even with tag completion. Even with a template to fill in. And when you do manage to input some well formed AST for your todo list, you're on an island by yourself, because everyone else is using free text (or their own, different tags or syntax). Because even if you have the same structure, you also need to use the same tags! What language are they supposed to be in?! They might as well be unique numbers unless you speak that language.

It's facepalms all the way down.

I've never worked in any field that might be considered "semantic web", but at my last gig I spent some time researching deductive database technology.

"Semantic web" was like a keyword that popped up in the abstract of virtually every paper published on the topic since the mid 90s or so. It seemed to me one of those phrases that virtually guaranteed grants of funding if you could work it into your paper.

I think you're correct that people working in the field of semantic web oftentimes didn't understand (or lost sight of) the intended nature and utility of the concept. But I also think that its buzzword status lead to the label being applied to many things that were only loosely related.

There was (is?) a lot of good work happening under the heading of "semantic web", but—partly because the term was not an apt one for the work, and partly because the dream of the semantic web never really actualized—that work has remained relatively obscure. Obversely, there was much work of questionable worth happening under the same banner, likely because it was a reliable way to get funding, at which point we return to that extremely important-sounding literature that's nothing but a giant ball of crap...

I took TBL's Semantic Web class ("Linked Data Ventures") when I was a grad student in the fall of 2010. The class was well structured, and included an introduction to basic concepts and languages, lectures by people using it in production environments, and group projects. I wrote an account of the first class here (http://www.ilamont.com/2010/09/encounter-with-tim-berners-le...) and you can see a demo of the rudimentary educational app our team built here (http://www.ilamont.com/2011/03/challenges-of-creating-mobile...).

As the title of the class indicates, the idea was to encourage the creation of real-world applications, and to that end the class groups were encouraged to have a mix of Course 6 and business school team members. At the time, it seemed that the Semantic Web was more of an academic/open source project rather than something that was widely embraced by developers, although some guest speakers did have working applications at their places of business. I think the hope was to seed the Cambridge startup ecosystem with SW/Linked Data examples that could encourage its spread into the real world.

One of the teams in our class actually turned their project into a startup that was later acquired. I ran into one of the co-founders a few years later and asked if they continued to use the Semantic Web/Linked Data model that they had demoed in class. The answer: No, because it couldn't scale. That was an issue that was anticipated and discussed during the class, but there was hopeful talk that scaling issues would be resolved in the near future through various initiatives.