Slashdot Mirror
Why the Semantic Web Will Fail
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)."
Thank God for Web4.1!
One of the problems is lack of standardization, and one of the symptoms is Yahoo! normalizing Flickr's user accounts with its own?
The semantic web will fail because it is too complex and noone outside the academic community working on it really understands it. The ad-hoc tagging systems and microformats Web 2.0 has brought are good enough for most people, and much simpler for the casual web developer to understand.
Doesn't Web 2.0 reach a "critical mass" as some point, where busineese will no longer be able to not cooperate? Of course, it all gets very fragile even then...
...says the guy who's blogging this opinion...
ilovegeorgebush
The researcher is just annoyed because no one sent him invites to Gmail.
It was created to solve a problem we had when everyone was using Hotbot and Altavista, but people are trying to introduce it into a world where everyone is using Google. (And Wikipedia. And all that Web 2.0 junk.)
I don't need you to mark "This page is a REVIEW of a CELL PHONE that has the NAME iPhone" anymore. All I need to do is Google "iPhone review" or hop on over to Amazon. Problem pretty freaking solved from my perspective.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Only way to set an industry standard is, to get so fast so big in a new market/technology that everybody has to follow.
Problem is, when you get so big so fast, there are almost neccessarily major flaws in the designs.
Problem is, you never get rid of them again.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
What are those rumors about Google who would be closing their search API ? Are we talking about the boxes we can put on our sites to make a search in Google ? I thought the add shown besides the results were their main revenue : Why the hell would they close it ?
I hate all sigs, mine included.
Is the semantic web supposed to be a success in the present times?
It might fail for the reasons given (no I've not read the full article yet - naturally) but personally I think it will fail simply because it's too much work for the amount of payback. It would be great if one day magically over night all our data was semantically marked up but that's not going to happen. The reality of it is that we will have to mark up the majority of content by hand. Even then inter-ontology mappings are so difficult that I'm not sure the system would be much use.
Perhaps worse than that though is the prospect of semantic spamming. It would be impossible to trust the semantic mark up in a document unless you could actually process the document and understand it. What would be the point in the mark up in that case?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I agree that the Semantic Web people haven't read their epistemology texts. Here's an interesting article on this topic, explaining how essentially, all this "web-of-meaning" stuff was tried by NLP/AI researchers decades ago, and plain does not work.
The article concludes that a "weak" version of the semantic web may be possible - no clever inference or anything, just a set of data interchange standards. Which is basically the XML / data interchange standards bit of Web 2.0.
But as the blog entry says, even that might not happen due to commercial interests. The obvious (and oh so Slashdot) thing to say at this point is that we need open, not-for-profit data interchange standards - but of course the commercial sites would then refuse to use them. Or if they did, they'd probably try to embrace-and-extend them.
it trivializes the hard problems, and then goes on to make the really soft ones look like they are hard. read shirky [http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism .html]
So what is this semantic web / web 2.0 thing anyway?
Sure, we're all seeing community sites, blogs, tagging, etc. But each of those sites is an individual site, and their only connections seem to be plain HTML links. Community sites don't really allow collaboration, blogs are standardized personal web pages and who here uses tags to actually find information? All these things might warrant a "Web 1.0 patch 3283" label, but is it really a new type of web? Is it the type and magnitude of paradigm shift that the first web was? It only seems like people are just becoming more aware of the possibilities of the same web it was 10 years ago.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Another problem is that we hear nothing but hype about the Semantic Web. Here on Slashdot, there's some fellow named Hal Porter who will always go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about how great the Semantic Web is. But all it is so far is hype. We see little in the way of tangible results.
But you're completely correct about complexity being a problem. I mean, look at the Semantic Web stack. It'll take most developers years to become suitably familiar with even a small portion of those technologies. And by the time they've managed to get even just a minimal grasp of such technologies, there's no doubt such knowledge will be completely outdated.
I challenge everyone to take a look at:
http://wiki.ontoworld.org/
It will take a while to understand and you'll probably need to read the instructions. But if you can imagine a more user-friendly version of this Wiki you'll begin to see why the Semantic Web is such a powerful idea. Yes, big corporations can really help launch a technology but they are not the be all and end all. Small businesses have played a big role in the emergence of new technologies. Remember those really small companies like Google, MySpace and Netscape?
My gut tells me the semantic web will take off. It won't be a utopia and won't fulfil all the promises, but like so many technologies, it will make things a little better than before.
Cedars.
I do not think it means what you think it means
Go to Wikipedia (for example) and look up the definition. Then tell me you understand it.
... which is marked up as being about Mini Coopers. I'm looking for stuff about 1964 Cooper S inlet manifold modifications. This page looks like it might be interesting to my client, but quite a lot of people get confused between the different models of SU carburettor which were used that year. Does this page refer to the model with the No.4 Red needle or not?'
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.
the Semantic Web Will Fail...Google will turn off its search API...will also cripple Web 3.0...the terrorists will win
Will these problems go away when we smoke even more crack? Or is this just another slownewsday item?
The thing the academics who push the semantic web fail to consider (most of the time) is that the Real World does not function like their Ideal World. In the Ideal World, everybody cooperates and works together to produce something of value for all mankind. So we get lots of correctly and appropriately marked up pages that give useful information on what's stored therein.
But in the Real World, any online system that is used by a large enough number of people will eventually become attractive for spammers and scammers to defile and twist to their own purposes. So you'll get a deluge of pages that appear to be useful reviews of digital cameras (and are marked up as such) but in fact simply go to a useless "search" page that has lots of link farm references.
And if you say "Ok, so we don't trust the author of the page, we have someone else do it"... then who? Who's going to do all the work? Answer: Nobody. AI is nowhere near being smart enough for this. Keyword searching is, unfortunately, here to stay. If you trust the author to do the markup, then the spammers have a field day. If you say "Only trusted authors" then the system will still fail, due to laziness on most people's part - if a system isn't trivial to implement and involves some kind of "authentication" or "authorization" then nobody will use it, period. The Web succeeded in the first place because anybody anywhere could just stick up a Web server and publish pages, and it was immediately visible to the whole world.
The Semantic Web will fail for the same reason that the "meta" tag failed in HTML: Any system that can be abused by spammers, will be abused.
So, the Semantic Web, which is all about helping people find stuff, will fail. Not because of any technological shortcomings (it's all very nice in theory), but simply because we as people won't work together to make it work. Well, a small number of people could work together, but as that number got larger, until it reaches the point of being useful, it will automatically get to the tipping point where it becomes worthwhile for the spammers to jump in and foul it all up.
The Semantic Web is a solution in search of a problem.
No matter how cool your RDF/OWL ontologies are, the real world is perfectly happy with plain XML/CSV. If there isn't an obvious benefit, people won't switch.
This sig is intentionally left blank
Maybe these things will fail in the public world of free service bureaus with which this guy is familiar, but the concept of webservice API is exploding in the vertical market spaces. In only the last two or three years virtually every single vendor my company works with in the financial industry has launched fully WSE compliant webservices to tie into their products. Previously you would have to work in batch by uploading a file to a secure FTP site and wait for results to appear as another file in that same FTP site. Now the results are real-time.
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.
+1 for figuring out how to bash Libertarians and Republicans in an article about the Internet; a task not easily accomplished.
I mostly agree with the article though. Companies will not adopt these technologies until it starts to cost them business. This article assumes, though, that will never happen. I disagree. I think things will move slow at first, but will start to see use more and more. Like all internet technologies, the more they are used, the more people are likely to use them.
After it would work the academic way. It would be spammed to hell.
Who do you trust giving away the right semantics for a page?
Maybe a handful of companies will trust each other. Or google will make them sign something?
Not a WEB I'm part of I guess.
this semantic web is not made for today or yesterday: it is made for the future. of course there are obstacles. but if the amount of available online content grows as rapidly as predicted we need a better way to find what we want: we need machine understandable annotations.
so the semantic web fails right now. but your google queries fail you in the future, then what? maybe then the semantic web will also make sense to to the guy who wrote this article.
First, the current Web 2.0={Facebook, Blogs, Tagging, Mashups, ... } is NOT the end of the Semantic Web. What tiny bit of SW technology that has leaked into the infrastructure of these technologies is a tiny fraction of the capabilities of this technology.
In fact, I am amazed and appalled at the general reaction of the slashdot community. The general consensus is that this couldn't possibly work because it will require "corporations" to come together (ironic given the etnymology of the word corporation). The same could be said of the early Linux community. That Linus Torvalds is never going to amount to anything because his new OS will require people all over the place to agree on standards (the kernel) and to cooperate in a huge development process that has never been tried on this scale before. I'm quite certain that Linux is just a passing fancy.
Seriously though, today's computing paradigm sucks. I spend most of my time working on stupid technical problems instead of actually working on the hard research issues I am trying to focus on. Case in point, I spent the weekend trying to get JDBC and/or PERL to insert a long string into a CLOB of XMLType with Oracle. Why? Because the agent I developed was performing tests and producing result sets in XML, and it would be handy to store in Oracle. In the end, I spent more time solving the "how do I do this stupid task" than working on the actual research issues of the project.
In other cases, we (as a community) still spend our time worrying about little bits of a the technical minutiae. One of the things that draws my interested toward the Semantic Web is that it won't work on today's computing paradigm. It isn't going to be successful so long as we are worried about connecting this SQL query to that CGI script, and discussing how we screen scrape that HTML page and extract that information from a CDF file. These are the things we have been doing since the first magentic tapes were sent in the mail to be read by some other system.
I think it is time that we start moving on and looking forward to what the next generation of computing CAN do. Yes, there are significant technical challenges ahead. Yes, there will be false starts and probably a high infant mortality rate as we move forward. Already there have been numerous Semantic Web languages (e.g. DAML+OIL) that are being replaced by others (e.g. OWL), and already the research community is pushing a new version of OWL to include in its definition things which we cannot do today.
I guess if anything, I am encouraged by the stalwarts of today's technology calling for the impending implosion of the Semantic Web. It means that the research community has pushed so far to the edge of what We (as a species) are currently capable of that only visionaries (not including myself in this set) can see the whole picture. This is good. This represents the first honest See-change in the future of computing that I've seen in years.
So, if anything, keep calling for its demise. Keep predicting its death. One day, when the research moves it from science to technology, you will be excited about how cool this new technology is, and Slashdot will be filled with discussions of how Microsoft's implementation of the Semantic Web is terrible, and how the OSS version of a Semantic Web database is 5% faster than Oracle's. And there will be some comfort in knowing that all is right in the world after all.
...is that it is this "free market" we live in that will ultimately make the semantic web a non-starter. Businesses won't collaborate because it doesn't afford them a competitive edge. In the end the real losers are we, the great unwashed. Not that a free market is a bad thing, it just doesn't always align with what's in the peoples' best interests.
it will fail because nobody apart from the academics and hippies who invented know wtf it actually means.
To me, that sounds the same as saying
"human language will never succeed".
OK, there may not be ONE and DEFINITIVE semantic web,
there may be MANY.
Better for the users. Like free market, you know?
Moreover, you can see the different languages both
as a problem and as a treasure. Depends on the point
of view...
The Flickr thing was a non-issue, how does it have anything to do with the Semantic Web?
Best essay on the topic I have come across: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm
... but not for the reasons the researcher cited.
This is the real world, most things aren't total successes or total failures.
Most likely the symantic web will fail to achieve all it's objectives but achieve some of them, and may eventually rise again after it's failed. This is the nature of progress. Good ideas that fail are usually resurrected later. However the blogger is probably right, as long as the symantic web is going to be "handed" to us by a group of established corporations it will most likely never succeed, there's too much incentive for back stabbing in that top-down implementation. For it to succeed it needs to be so obvious that there's more money and power available by playing nice that all but the most black hearted capitalists will play nice. We have to be aware that people like spammers exist, though, and anything that could potentially be used to generate advantage will be abused to death.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
But there are three ways to get that.
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.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The more functionality and interactivity you have between what were always envisioned as static documents, the more security holes are opened up. This combined with the Search Engine Optimization Industry, which is dedicated to lying about a sites content and relative importance, will ultimately sink any attempt to bring any trustable semanticness to the Web.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I categorically condemn these anti-semantic comments. There is no place in our modern, advanced society for bigots like these blatant anti-semantites. Someone should alert the ACLU.
Life needs more saving throws.
What if the semantic web were done in a wiki that anyone could edit? That would make it more accurate, I would think.
Will this mean that I will never be able to search for "Girls with breasts bigger than 36D"?
I used to love semantic Web 5.1, but I'm sorry to say it can't even handle the simplest Word. I wonder who will make the Web Perfect? We need a Novell idea, I think.
I recently read a critique of "weak" SW (the "lower case semantic web") techniques like microformats, etc. The idea was that we need a high level metadata standard.
Contrary to this opinion:
I recently wrote in my my AI blog about my expectations that the SW will develop from the bottom up. I also wrote about this 3 years ago (PDF "Jumpstarting the Semantic Web", skip to page 3).
So, I partially agree with Stephen Downes that cooperation is unlikely, but the SW in some form will happen.
the author can sign those keywords. Second step is to keep a rating of this author somewhere. A bad author can be added to blacklists, a good author can be given extra karma.
Lying cannot be expelled but people can recognize it.
nosig today
Right now, we're building semweb based trust metrics for email. I have allready plugins for SpamAssassin and Qpsmtpd, though they are for small scale stuff, we have like 25 million profiles we could use.
For example, your concerns about digital camera reviews are addressed by Revyu.
All in all, there is a lot of stuff going on in this area, both big forward-looking academic projects and practical implementations.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Every now and then, put <p> between the sentences.
Like that, see? Then your post won't look like the fucking rosetta stone.
One of the features of the W3C's model (based on RDF) is that it doesn't push the idea that everyone should adopt the same vocabulary (or ontology) for a topic or domain. Instead it offers a way to publish vocabularies with some semantics, including how terms in one vocabulary relate to terms in another. In addition, the framework makes it trivial to publish data in which you mix vocabularies, making statements about a person, for example, using terms drawn from FOAF, Dublin Core and others.
The RDF approach was designed with interoperability and extensibility in mind, unlike many other approaches. RDF is showing increasing adoption, showing up in products by Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft, for example.
If this approach doesn't continue to flourish and help realize the envisioned "web of data", and it might not after all, it will have left some key concepts, tested and explored, on the table for the next push. IMHO, the 'semantic web' vision -- a web of data for machines and their users -- is inevitable.
His second point is just a common misconceptions and FAQs. It doesn't require that people does that.
I have just accepted a position with a consultancy that does a fair amount of work for those cut-throat businesses. And they are interested, very interested, in fact. Which is also why Oracle, IBM, HP, even Microsoft is interested.
Typical use case for them is: So, you bought your competitor, and each of the companies sit on big valuable databases that are incompatible. You have huge data integration problem that needs solving fast. So, throw in an RDF model, which is actually a pretty simple model. Use the SPARQL query language. Now all employees have access to the data they need. Problem solved. Lots of money saved. Good.
But this is not part of the open web, you say? Indeed, you're right. So, Semantic Web technologies have allready succeeded, but not on the open web. And since I'm such an idealist, I want it on the open web. So, the blog still has a valid point.
We need to make compelling reasons why they should put (some) data on the open web. It isn't easy, but then, let TimBL tell you it wasn't easy to get them on the web in the first place. It is not very different, actually. The main approach to this is capitalise on network effects. There is a lot of public information, and we need to start with that.
So, partly, that's what I'll do. We have emergent use cases, and that's the evil part of cut-throat business. You don't talk about those before they happen. So, sorry about that. I think it will be very compelling, but it'll take a few years. If you're the risk-averse kinda developer who first and foremost has a family to feed, then I understand that you don't want to risk anything, and you can probably jump on the bandwagon a couple of years from now, having lost relatively little.
But if you, like me, like to live on the edge, and doesn't mind taking risks doing things that of course might fail, then I think semweb is one of most interesting things right now.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Wow, very cool. Thanks for the link, one of the coolest things I've seen in a good while. This addresses one of my biggest gripes with Wikipedia, unstructured data. Which is related to my other big gripe - that everything on Wikipedia is done manually. Being able to richly express properties and relationship between pages allows you to remove a huge amount of redundant data and tedious labor.
I think the problem is in the author's head. Difficulties always exist between vendors. They are worked out when the beneifts of cooperation outweigh the benefits of non-cooperation. I believe what we are calling the semantic web has other features that many consider failure but in reality are inherent to sharing the amount of information we are trying to share, namely, universal uniformity and a single clean interface into human civilization (which is really what the sm is) is impossible and foolish to hope for. The semantic web will make some things vastly easier and the price we will pay is that other things will become far more difficult. This will stimulate more innovations and hence more problems, etc.
Ivan Handler
Apart from the issues of semantic web relying on people to be unbiased, honest, and smart it seems like using this semantic idea to catalog everything is like using high school level general mechanics to describe the universe.
It all works just fine as long as you don't want to talk about incline planes that have friction or springs that have mass. Describing lots of real things is messy.
I think at this point we'd have a better shot at making machines think like people rather than trying to get people to think like machines.
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
* groan *
Who didn't see that coming?
The reason this will not work is because businesses don't want to share information. They want to make as much money as they can from it. The Semantic Web will look appealing to smaller organizations and individuals, but businesses won't consider it.
"The way to realize the Semantic Web is to advance AI technology to the point where it becomes an automated process. Anything less would require too much manual labor to take off."
Or you could make the process transparent by turning it into a game.
"The semantic web is doomed to fail because language is far more highly personalized than anyone wants to believe. "
That's why one uses Folksonomy in conjunction with Ontologies.
Once invited to the club, all of the members (Microsoft, Google, IBM, etc.) will be watching each other like hawks to make sure nobody breaks out ahead of the pack with some new technology. Because of this, I think that the various components that make up something like a semantic web will come from outsiders. Maybe from a couple of students at Stanford. Or more likely a start-up in Bangalore. They seem to be getting quite a lot of the data mining contract work and I'd bet that this expertise is what will grow into a web-wide product.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well we're looking at this from a very bottom-up perspective (as us geeks are wont to do). Consider it a bit more top-down and you've got a very different outlook...
A classic example of where the SW would be very helpful considers simple information interchange between two or three entities, each containing disparate but related data. Say you're sitting at your PC, when your boss schedules an offsite meeting for you. You get his email, which has the address of where you're meant to go. How about if your PC could look up this address automatically on the web, get a route, then Bluetooth it into your car's SatNav system?
You can't currently do that because your email program doesn't know an address when it sees it, and your SatNav can't interpret a route created by, say, Multimap.
Naturally, you could pick holes in that example (SatNav's can plot their own routes, I know) but it's illustrative nonetheless.
We don't have to switch the entire web over to be semantic in a short period of time, but the technology should be available for when it would be useful. Then, as people adopt it, it will cause that paradigm shift people are talking about... albeit very slowly.
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
"While the argument he makes is grounded in his distrust of corporations, which I share to some degree, his second point above is off the mark, at least for RDF"
The problem with this aspect of his argument is that companies ARE working together, even if they're not dragging the slashcrowd into their sphere. For example web services between suppliers and buyers. Or the sharing of data (remember it's exponentially growing) between equals. e.g. catalog.
"The RDF approach was designed with interoperability and extensibility in mind, unlike many other approaches. RDF is showing increasing adoption, showing up in products by Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft, for example."
You left out Mozilla. Yes it uses RDF internally.
I think the big issue right now is that the computer industry doesn't even know what they mean by "Web 2.0" and the marketing departments hide their ignorance admirably by repeating buzzwords until people think they understand concepts they don't. Ok, Tim O'Reilly is careful to define such terms when he uses them (good for him!) but few others seem to do the same.
At least with things like TCP/IP, relational database theory, information theory, and the like, the concepts are well defined, not some mishmash of marketing buzzwordspeak and sloppy definition. Of course, TCP/IP as it is now often taught (via OSI) is just as muddled even though the model is (and ought to be) clear as daylight. If people are going to cover OSI and TCP/IP they ought to cover the entire protocol ideas, design criteria, etc. That way people will *understand* why OSI protocols (like H.323) are so awkward when run on TCP/IP. [/rant]
The big thing is, instead of having a vague marketing buzzword about something, it is helpful if we devide things into usable and practical concepts. Social networking, web services, service oriented architectures, semantic markup, etc. rather than lumping it all together into a vague term that doesn't really mean anything.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Google already turned off its Search API for new registrations; only those already w/ accounts can continue using the web services-based search API. I believe their AJAX API, which is less useful, is still open.
The thing the academics who push the web search fail to consider (most of the time) is that the Real World does not function like their Ideal World. In the Ideal World, everybody cooperates and works together to produce something of value for all mankind. So we get lots of correctly and appropriately hyperlinked pages that give useful information on what's stored therein.
But in the Real World, any online system that is used by a large enough number of people will eventually become attractive for spammers and scammers to defile and twist to their own purposes. So you'll get a deluge of pages that appear to be useful reviews of digital cameras (and are hyperlinked as such) but in fact simply go to a useless "search" page that has lots of link farm references.
And if you say "Ok, so we don't trust the author of the page, we have someone else do it"... then who? Who's going to do all the work? Answer: Nobody. AI is nowhere near being smart enough for this. Keyword searching is, unfortunately, here to stay. If you trust the author to do the markup, then the spammers have a field day. If you say "Only trusted authors" then the system will still fail, due to laziness on most people's part - if a system isn't trivial to implement and involves some kind of "authentication" or "authorization" then nobody will use it, period. The Web succeeded in the first place because anybody anywhere could just stick up a Web server and publish pages, and it was immediately visible to the whole world.
The web search will fail for the same reason that the "meta" tag failed in HTML: Any system that can be abused by spammers, will be abused.
So, the web search, which is all about helping people find stuff, will fail. Not because of any technological shortcomings (it's all very nice in theory), but simply because we as people won't work together to make it work. Well, a small number of people could work together, but as that number got larger, until it reaches the point of being useful, it will automatically get to the tipping point where it becomes worthwhile for the spammers to jump in and foul it all up.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
But how do you get them to do it? That is the hardest part. If they're not dedicated, I doubt they will be doing their best. BTW I mean (and meant) "dedicated" in the emotional sense, not the tasking sense.
It's not hard to aggregate one small group of people in the entire world who LOVE hamsters and will build out the ultimate hamster Web page, or at least a good hamster resource. In fact due to targeted advertising there is sometimes a monetary reward for such focused effort.
It's considerably harder (for me anyway) to imagine that everyone who ever looks at any Web page about hamsters will bother clicking in and adding or editing tags. Most Web surfers are just passive.
In addition the good tags will only drown out the bad for the most popular subjects. For niche assets where there might only be a few tag edits in total, it only takes a few bad tags to pollute the usefulness. The long tail suffers the most.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"I don't care about pages, I want information, answers to questions."
In a world where just linking to another site can be illegal you expect to get information out of context?
Ironically enough I found this in one quick Google search using "deep linking violates copyright", along with a list of alternative sources about the same topic.
The reason Semantic will fail is because they have the anti-midas touch. Look what they did to Ghost and to BackupExec and Norton etc etc. The list goes on. I don't understand Semantic any more...
The semantic web is inevitable. It is already being used in subgroups of users of the web: intranets, biology, semantic wikis etc.
Does anyone really NOT want to see the web develop to its full potential? Is there any other direction the advancement of the web could take?