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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)."
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]
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.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html
http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/
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.
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.
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.
Google is actually somewhat fault-tolerant when it comes to spellings - it doesn't just offer suggestions along the lines of "did you mean FOOBAR" when it thinks you mistyped something, it also includes spelling variants in your search results by default. I can't come up with a *good* example right now, but for a bad one, try to search for "head set" (sans quotes) and observe that you also get hits for the word "headset".
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.
butter the donkey
There might not be a clear revolution, but there certainly is a lot of evolution going on. For example, compare early web pages (written a mere 15 years ago) to, say, Google Maps; I think it's safe to say that there happened more than just a move from "Web 1.0" to "Web 1.0 patch 3283".
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.
butter the donkey
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.
How is the Semantic Web supposed to mitigate those facts? As far as I know it still relies on the site telling the world what it is about - and just like I can put "horny schoolgirls viagra playstation ponies" in an invisible <div> I can surely publish an RDF document stating that my website is about sex, naval warfare and Segways. We don't get less junk, we just get machine-readable junk.
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.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I believe all your arguments have been used to explain why Wikipedia will fail. Well, it hasn't failed yet.
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.
If you post it, they will read.