The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

Building a trust relationship between commercial entities isn't automatable; it nearly always requires a contract to be carefully hand-written and argued over by high-priced lawyers before any meaningful exchange of value can take place.

Sure, this is an unfortunate level of friction, and overkill in many cases, but think about it from a cost/benefit perspective: I can spend $10k on legal fees and successfully avoid not just a lot of uncertainty, but very infrequently, the contract also protects me from losses that can be orders of magnitude larger than it cost me to negotiate the contract.

The answer to almost any question beginning with "why don't they" (or why didn't they), is almost always "money".

Producing, aggregating, storing, or otherwise adding value to information costs money. Operating the internet costs money. Providing access to data costs money.

People are lazy. Businesses on the internet have learned that they can extract more money from this vast pool of lazy people by presenting information rather than just providing information. By this, I mean that the value-add and/or lock-in of many internet businesses is tied to how the information is presented; adopting a standard format would be effort that would not be financially rewarded.

(by "lazy", I mean "looking for local minima in effort to accomplish whatever task that they're trying to do")

Finally, the web envisioned itself as a hypermedia system that incorporated presentation (and subsequently active content) instead of just semantic content. Since presentation is a property of the web, it was quickly adopted for the reasons described above and evolved into the modern web (which replaced the blink tag with shit tons of javascript, don't get me started).

Therefore the "semantic web" could never exist because "semantics" is fundamentally incompatible with "web". Once you invent the web, you can't have the semantic web anymore because money.

We shoulda stuck with gopher.

Oh, I would like to see a look on your face when just in about 100-200 years from now it will be mature enough for a "web scale".

It’s unclear to me at this point why people are contributing to Wikipedia and certainly wikidata, but they’re getting something out of it (perhaps notoriety), and a lot probably has to do with contributing to the greater good. It’s all non profit. The rest of the web is unlike these stand out projects.

Meanwhile, why would say Mouser or Airbnb pay someone to markup their docs? WebMD? Clearly nothing has been compelling them to do so thus far, and when you’re talking about harvesting data and using it elsewhere, it’s a difficult argument to make. Google already gets them plenty of traffic without these efforts.

While I love the semantic web I see two major issues with it:

1. Standardization in regards of (globally) unique identifiers and ontologies. Most things un the semantic web have multiple identifiers and, based on personal preferences, attributes linked to different ontologies. There's several projects that try to gather data for the same thing from various ontologies, but sometimes the same attributes have differing values because of conversions or simply extracting data points from different publications where different methods have been used to measure stuff.

2. Performance of large datasets gets really bad since distributing graphs is still a problem that lacks good solutions. One of the solutions is to store data in distributed column stores. But there's still a ton of unsolved graph traversal performance issues.

I strongly believe that the technological batriers need to be solved first. Until then there will always be the person in meetings, asking why not use relational or NoSql tech because of performance...