Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

1. There are few Internet historians. It is difficult and thankless work that doesn't pay well. And too much of the information is lost to history, or can protested by gain-saying, even the true bits.

2. The first browser, Silversmith, was released in 1987. [http://www.linfo.org/browser.html] (thanks BELUG). It worked in English and grew out of my work on the Association of American Publisher's Electronic Manuscript project, the first U.S. electronic publishing project using tags outside of IBM's product offerings. At the time I had been on the Internet since 1972 and I was tired of typing 128.24.67.xxx. (There was a phone book of IP addresses at the time and I was listed in it for work I was doing on satellite image processing on Illiac.)

3. The second browser, a version of Silversmith, was designed for Old Norse for a researcher and it used Norse runes for the display; the controls were in Roman characters.

4. The third browser, a version of Silversmith, was a semantic browser for a U.S. military application. It was successful as far as I know.

5. The fourth browser, Erwise, [http://www.osnews.com/story/21076/The_World_s_First_Graphica...] came about after I gave a paper on Silversmith in Gmunden, Austria in 1988. Erwise worked in the Finnish language. I understand that TimBL looked at it before developing the W3c browser but decided against using it because the comments were in Finnish.

6. I have seen various dates for the browsers from TimBL and MarcA, but they were at least a few years after Silversmith. We can call them the 5th and 6th, but I'm not sure of the ordering. Both of these browsers were based on the earlier AAP Book tag set.

7. Some of my work on Silversmith grew out of Ted Nelson's work on the Alexandria (Xanadu) project. Much of his work has still not been implemented, but that may soon change.

8. Ted developed hypertext controls for printed documents. In that approach when you finished reading a child section a return page number was there to show you where you left off.

9. I developed the first eHypertext system for networks that would link you back to your source document that you came from by pressing the ESC key. In Silversmith you could link between text, images, sound and semantic information.

10. Silversmith is a scalable system. Please observe that just because you don't know how that is done, does not mean it cannot be done. That was what was told me about browsing and searching earlier also.

11. At the time Silversmith was developed, it was understood that VC's would not talk to you without you having a working product. Once I had it working, I found that VC's would still not talk to you. I talked with about a dozen Boston VC's. They would not even sit for a demonstration. I did a demonstration for the ACM in 2007 (thanks PeterG). That is the nature of tools and the bane of toolsmiths, no one wants to pay for tools. I have a recurring nightmare of the yokel who returned his anvil to the smithy saying, "It doesn't work. I can't use it to make beautiful horseshoes like Kevin does, and he has the same anvil. There's something wrong with this one." With Silversmith I lost a competition among 80 vendors for a search application, when none of the others even had an application. One competitor even called me and demanded all my specs and internal design documents. That is largely why you will not find any published information on Silversmith.

12. I can't tell you how many times I have been schooled on programming languages. "You should program that using ThinkC/ObjectiveC/SmallTalk/the X-System." "You need to switch to Ruby-On-Rails/Perl/Python/Awk, that's the way to do it." People, it's not the language, it's the data structures and the code that is important. And, enough with "speed is important." We are all using supercomputers and they will never be fast enough.

13. Silversmith predated the W3c work by several years, that is why I prefer to use the term "semantic web" (lower case) to distinguish it from the W3c term. I discussed the term "web" with Ted and he agreed that was in use earlier before the WWW.

14. Monitizing a tool is an interesting discussion. No one wants to pay $1 every time they pick up a hammer. But for a cabinetmaker, his/her primary tool is the table saw. This means that they are more than willing to pay on a regular basis for maintenance. They must, it is their livelihood, and the manufacturer is going to make money on that maintenance. He does not expect to be able to charge the cabinetmaker a portion of his sales. That is not how that market works. To me, even razor and blades are not fully monitized if you sharpen your own blades.

15. Semantic work is "path dependent" work. Once you start down a certain path it becomes very difficult to retrace your steps. I used to be critical of academics who "sold out" to the W3c vision, but now I realize that for the most part they are trying to provide what the industry wants and uses.

16. Work on Silversmith continues and I'm pleased to say that it is progressing well. The next version will assist in finding and using knowledge in a more conceptual way.

I mean the person looking for the hours would probably go to one of those sites, but the hours wouldn’t be stored there.

History's written by the victors, so this is a little SGML oriented -- I still recall my own transition from developing Gopher sites to WWW sites for Lynx, and how at the time, these things felt the same -- though it was clear what would win.

Wikipedia's discussion of browser history also omits Gopher + clients, which is too bad, it was kind of a big deal at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser#Pre...

To put it on the timeline, your Silversmith was 1987, Berners Lee's WWW browser 1990, McCahill's Gopher 1991, Lynx 1992, and Andreessen's Mosaic 1993.

Still blown away by the force of an idea trying to happen.