An Intro To The Semantic Web: Why You Need To Know About It Sooner Than Later

&#62; Very broadly, things on the Internet will be described with descriptor languages<p>No. This will not happen.<p>Look, before Google, internet search relied on people adding meta tags to their pages so that the search engines could know what a page was about. You had two languages, one for humans, and one for computers.<p>But people don't really care about having correct meta tags or headers or other invisible markers containing instructions for search engines, which is why Google steamrolled the market when it appeared. Google ignored all the instructions and instead analyzed the human language on web pages, and inferred relevance based on that.<p>If semantic search engines or analyzers or other technology wants to become widespread, it cannot rely on extra markup, it cannot rely on people adding descriptors of meaning to the data it indexes, it has to determine that meaning from the data directly.

In 2003 I wrote my M.Sc. thesis about semantic web technologies such as RDF, RDFS and querying such semantic graphs.<p>It's seven years later, nothing happened in terms of real-world adoption, it's safe to declare it DOA. In fact it's been safe for several years.

I've been hearing this for five years. Any real examples yet?

It'll be interesting to see whether this is widely adopted. As others have said, I've been reading this sort of article for at least 4 years now and there doesn't seem to be much progress.<p>Perhaps the metacrap rant (<a href="http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm</a>) was right?<p>Seems that way at the moment.

I've tried several times to get really excited about the semantic web, but in the end I tend to arrive at the same conclusion: so far it's still feels like over engineering a solution to a problem I'm not sure we have. A perfect example of this is OWL, which in its pure form is so expressive that it is completely useless for automated reasoning (due to computational intractability). If you were to build an automated reasoning system to solve a real problem you had, you would never arrive at OWL.<p>Additionally there seems to be a whole lot of reinventing the wheel. The best semweb people are aware of all the past research in logic programming and automated reasoning, but most semweb enthusiasts seem to be hardly aware of prolog let alone that rdf triples are just another way to express what clauses do in prolog.<p>If we're really trying to solve the 'problem' that semweb addresses we'd be seeing more articles titled "intro to logic programming, knowledge representation and automated reasoning"

I think this doesn't take economics into consideration. most companies aren't that interested in sharing their data in an anonymous way.

<a href="http://www.rdfabout.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rdfabout.com/</a><p>I think this is a better intro for technical folk.

I'm with henrikschroder and call bullshit on semantic web being a big thing, let alone the <i>next</i> big thing. It's an attractive idea, but flawed. There are some niches where structured semantic data will flourish (see examples in other comments), but it will be a vast subset of the web.<p>A better idea is extracting latent semantic information from the existing messy web. However, "meaning" is extremely difficult to characterize, and attempting to encode it in an interoperable manner inevitably leads to a lowest common denominator approach. That will probably still provide tons of value and be much more ubiquitous than structured data, but will ultimately be shallow and fall far short of the vision most semantic web proponents evangelize.

In a world where Facebook's oddly named "Graph" API does not allows an authorized user to see friends of his friends, Semantic Web is just a day dream.