The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

I'm always surprised when articles like these don't talk about the meaning behind the original phrase. The semantic web came to be because there existed a need for computers to understand the contents of webpages, which were invariably human-generated.

We now have a huge set of tools for that under the broader AI/ML umbrella - ML is obviously imperfect, but its cautious utilization across various industries is, to me, a step in the right direction. There's simply no need to pigeonhole ourselves into a "semantic web" data model that might not fit a particular topic or application.

I personally think that embeddings (https://milvus.io/docs/v1.1.0/vector.md) will eventually take over semantic search applications. NLP, for better or worse, have seen great success naively throwing text into massive pre-trained models (I say naively because a lot of these models still think Obama or Trump is president). We've also made great progress unifying the architecture of NLP and CV models via transformer architectures, and we're now seeing lots of CV applications follow suit.

Looks like it's been temporarily suspended, but worth mentioning: The Cambridge Semantic Web meetup, which I attended frequently around 2010-2013. It was cofounded by Tim Berners-Lee, and I got to meet him there a couple times. In fact, I think its earliest iteration was Berners-Lee and Aaron Swartz.

Met once a month in the STAR room at MIT. The best part was staying after to schmooze and drink with older programmers at the Stata Center bar down the hall from the STAR room. What a cool building, the Stata Center! And what cool topics we would discuss every week. Since Cambridge has so many pharma companies, a lot of the talks were regarding practical ontologies for pharmacology.

edit, a spandrel: Isn't w3c based out of MIT? And Swartz and Berners-Lee were in Boston at the same time.

https://www.meetup.com/The-Cambridge-Semantic-Web-Meetup-Gro...

In the late 1990s, I worked on lowercase-semantic Web problems.

I used descriptions like "the Web as distributed machine-accessible knowledgebase".

Some of the problems I identified were already familiar or hinted at from other domains (e.g., getting different parties to use the same terms or ontology, motivating the work involved, the incentive to lie (initially thinking mostly thinking about how marketers stretch the facts about products, though propaganda etc. was also in mind), provenance and trust of information, mitigations of shortcomings, mitigating the mitigations, etc.).

One problem I didn't tackle... I got into distributing computation among huge numbers of humans, and probably stopped thinking about commercial organization incentives. I don't recall at that time asking "what happens if a group of some kind invests lots of effort into a knowledge representation, and some company freeloads off of that, without giving back?". But we had seen eamples of that in various aspects of pre-Web Internet and computing. Maybe I was thinking something akin to compilation copyright, or that the same power that generated the value could continue to surprise and outperform hypothetical exploiters. Also, in the late 1990s, every crazy idea without traditional business merit was getting funded, and it was all about usefulness (or stickiness) and what potential/inspiration you could show.

Agree with the grounding opportunity.

It's worth noting that much of the time the grounding source might be just something like a product database (not a knowledge graph at all).