The Semantic Web Identity Crisis? More Like Intellectual Cotton Candy?
February 22, 2021
“The Semantic Web identity Crisis: In Search of the Trivialities That Never Were” is a 5,700 word essay about confusion. The write up asserts that those engaged in Semantic Web research have an “ill defined sense of identity.” What I liked about the essay is that semantic progress has been made, but moving from 80 percent of the journey over the last 20 percent is going to be difficult. I would add that making the Semantic Web “work” may be impossible.
The write up explains:
In this article, we make the case for a return to our roots of “Web” and “semantics”, from which we as a Semantic Web community—what’s in a name—seem to have drifted in search for other pursuits that, however interesting, perhaps needlessly distract us from the quest we had tasked ourselves with. In covering this journey, we have no choice but to trace those meandering footsteps along the many detours of our community—yet this time around with a promise to come back home in the end.
Does the write up “come back home”?
In order to succeed, we will need to hold ourselves to a new, significantly higher standard. For too many years, we have expected engineers and software developers to take up the remaining 20%, as if they were the ones needing to catch up with us. Our fallacy has been our insistence that the remaining part of the road solely consisted of code to be written. We have been blind to the substantial research challenges we would surely face if we would only take our experiments out of our safe environments into the open Web. Turns out that the engineers and developers have moved on and are creating their own solutions, bypassing many of the lessons we already learned, because we stubbornly refused to acknowledge the amount of research needed to turn our theories into practice. As we were not ready for the Web, more pragmatic people started taking over.
From my point of view, it looks as if the Semantic Web thing is like a flashy yacht with its rudders and bow thrusters stuck in one position. The boat goes in circles. That would drive the passengers and crew bonkers.
Stephen E Arnold, February 22, 2021
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