Why the Semantic Web Will Fail 179
Jack Action writes "A researcher at Canada's National Research Council has a provocative post on his personal blog predicting that the Semantic Web will fail. The researcher notes the rising problems with Web 2.0 — MySpace blocking outside widgets, Yahoo ending Flickr identities, rumors Google will turn off its search API — and predicts these will also cripple Web 3.0." From the post: "The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating. There is no way they: (1) would agree on web standards (hah!) (2) would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say) (3) would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)."
the real reason? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Reason #1 the Semantic Web will fail (Score:5, Interesting)
Just not true. For one thing, Google's results are much too noisy. For another, it relies on keywords occurring on pages, and that's rather primitive (it's not always trivial to find good keywords, and even then you might miss the one page your were looking for because they used a synonym or misspelled it).
But the most important reason is that it would be much cooler to have a web where you could say "give me a list of all the goals scored by Romario" and have it list them for me. I don't care about pages, I want information, answers to questions. That's what the Semantic Web is supposed to be a first mini step for.
Re:"Why the semantic web will fail" (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web [wikipedia.org]
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html [w3.org]
http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/ [infomesh.net]
Nothing on any of those pages indicated that blogging is an inherent part of the "semantic web". As best as I can tell, the semantic web people want there to be some kind of SQL language for websites, so you can type "SELECT `images` FROM `websites` WHERE `porn` > 0 AND `price` = 0 AND `subject` = 'shitting dick nipples'" instead of going to Google or something.
I guess it'd be nice to end my dependance on GOOG, but I think this naysayer guy with the blog makes some good points.
If it can't be defined it can't succeed (Score:2, Interesting)
See? Not a hope that a concept which includes 'collaborative working groups' as part of its definition can ever succeed.
I mean these are the people which gave us HTML and CSS, god help us.
Meaning is derived by humans from the interaction between data, knowledge and dialogue. What the semantic web will give us is:
1) Data
2) Limited knowledge to the extent that common, sufficiently rich models of relationships, taxonomies and ontologies are applied to the data.
3) No dialogue. When Google can say 'hello Mr www.fountainofallknowledge.com. I see you have a page called
And get a sensible reply.
Which it understands.
Then I'll be interested. Until then all it will be is tagging but with a poncy name and a load of spurious academic nonsense being spouted around it to make it sound exciting.
Other Market (Score:2, Interesting)
Companies are certainly embracing the new standards (and yes, there are standards) and they are certainly using them to replace existing older protocols and there is a lot of money to be made in this field.
Re:Reason #1 the Semantic Web will fail (Score:2, Interesting)
I do agree about noise, but only to the extent that the spam sites and the like you get when searching for, um, certain terms are annoying. Outside of that, the sites you cast aside as irrelevant may well be what someone else was looking for, and that's doubly true for queries that are not as specific as "give me a list of all the goals scored by Romario". I sometimes look up error messages etc. on Google, for example, and any mailing list archive where they are mentioned might have the solution I'm looking for. I'm not sure at all how the semantic web would deal with that kind of query.
Re:What is it anyway? (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem with "web 2.0" is not that the web hasn't changed dramatically, it's that the term is rooted in marketing rather than technology.
Everyone can agree that would be cool (Score:4, Interesting)
1) A search service that indexes all of Romario's goals.
2) A manually built asset that aggregates all of Romario's goals.
3) A standard system of semantic tags that self-identifies all Romario goal assets.
#1 is Google. As you point out now it relies primarily on keywords but you oversell the problem in two ways. First of all most video hosting sites already provide author and/or community tagging--thus providing a way for keywords to be assigned. Second, you're comparing a future semantic Web against the Google of today.
#2 can be provided by commercial video companies now ("1,000 Great Man U Goals," etc). It's also possible that a fan site could do the manual labor to find, upload, and keyword the videos.
#3 is the "semantic Web" approach, wherein all content providers follow a standard for self-identifying their content in a computer-parsable way.
The thing that distinguishes 1 and 2 from 3 is the scope of work required. #1 and #2 rely on a small team of dedicated people to accomplish the task. #3 relies on a very broad group of people of varying levels of dedication.
If you're talking practically about the solution, none of those approaches are going to to get to 100%. As others have pointed out there is a real human semantic problem in identifying which goals of Romario to count, how far back to look, etc.
But the key is that #1 and #2 are approaches of a scope that we know can work. #3 seems unlikely to get the buy-in and effort required.
Re:Reason #1 the Semantic Web will fail (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, false advertisement aside, when requesting a listong of everything pertaining to, say, "Alice Cooper", how do you deal with the thirty million hits for websites that offer Alice Cooper lyrics? Of course you can construct complex queries, but that's also possible with Google.
Re:One word: SPAM (Score:3, Interesting)
Ummm...
1) Academia won't allow Wikipedia as a primary reference
2) Steven Colbert
3) Authorities with unverified academic credentials
4) Reversion wars
5) Article lock-downs
Also, Wikipedia relies on many editors working on a single resource, wherease the SW relies on single editors working on many resources. It is hard to corrupt many editors, but easier to have corrupt single editors.