The Semantic Web Is Dead. Long Live the Semantic Web

My take is that it is a bunch of ideas to make it easier for search engines to crawl and use your data about all kinds of things. On one hand, that is great.

However, the huge problem with using it is that you end up creating your own search engine to crawl data sources to do anything useful. That is to say, you have to crawl the data, store it somewhere, and then build up your own systems for querying or doing anything useful with the data.

The use case many people have is that they want to use and API to get some particular bit of data out and that's it. Like, say you want to do a search for a list of tweets on Twitter with the hashtag #HackerNews. The sane thing to do is to be able to hit a twitter api endpoint and have it send you back a list of tweets with that hash tag.

Now, imagine if instead you had to index all of twitter and filter yourself for tweets with #HackerNews in it. Is that better for that particular use case? No, it sucks.

There are certainly cases where you DO want to crawl data and do your own data analysis on it. But, that is a much more limited use case for many developers and there isn't as much value in that as people seem to believe.

A better solution would be something like REST with HATEOS on a much larger scale. You'd be able to index things nicely, but still have the benefits of smarter API calls.

Unfortunately, I don't see this happening anytime soon, despite the interesting things you could build with it.

There is no better way of expressing why "the semantic web" as it was originally conceived failed, and will always fail. This is not to say that automated processing to extract higher-level information of the kind the article argues for might not be both helpful and possible, but it will always be awkward, difficult and imperfect. The awkwardness and difficulty will go down as AI gets better, but the imperfection has a fairly high minimum level because the kind of meaning humans extract from language varies enormously between individuals.

As a friend who works in geology put it: "If I send a bunch of geologists out to survey an area and combine their data naively, I can tell who mapped where but not what anybody mapped." The illusion of shared meaning is powerful, and with enormous effort we can get communities of shared meaning that are large and powerful enough to be extremely useful, but we do that either through top-down control (politics, corporations, militaries) or intense bottom-up interaction (the sciences), not the kind of loose, informal, disconnected mechanisms that the Web enables.

I'd love to find out more about what you have in mind here. Can you elaborate?

THIS is why it failed: you guessed what the thing was from the name instead of actually learning about it.

Also: "death throes"