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)."

Comments

Far out!

[neonmonk]

Thank God for Web4.1!

It will fail for other reasons too

[jrumney]

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.

Re:It will fail for other reasons too

[tbriggs6]

Have you ever read the original presentation of work by Codd on relational databases? How about the RFC standards on TCP/IP? How about the original presentation and arguments on the inclusion of Interrupts in a processor? Boy, those were so easy to understand and obvious that they were even published at all. The process of science is to push the state of the art; which by definition is new and novel. This is the job of the computer science researcher. It is left to others to examine the research and reformulate in terms that mere mortals can understand. If you understand the concepts behind the OSI layers, Lambda expressions, or symmetric multi-processing, thank a computer science educator who abstracted and distilled the hell of the science and research and packaged in such a way that you can understand it and maybe even use it. To claim that failure is imminent because the current presentation of the Semantic Web is too complex is nonsense.

Re:It will fail for other reasons too

[Niten]

You're missing the point. It's not that the current "presentation" of the Semantic Web is too complex; the problem is that actually creating the Semantic Web is too complex a task for most Web content creators to be interested in.

Essentially, the Semantic Web asks users to explicitly state relations between concepts and ideas to make up for our current lack of an AI capable of discerning such things for itself from natural human language. But let's face it, the average Joe writing his weblog or LiveJournal entries - or even a more technical user such as myself - would generally not be interested in performing this time-consuming task, even with the aid of a fancy WordPress plugin or other automated process. This is what the parent meant by saying it's just "too complicated".

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.

Reason #1 the Semantic Web will fail

[patio11]

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.

Re:Reason #1 the Semantic Web will fail

[Scarblac]

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:Reason #1 the Semantic Web will fail

[Chris_Jefferson]

All those spam and sales people will probably still tag their page with "review", the same way people used to stick anything and everything in META tags. The semantic web won't make people tell the truth about their pages...

Re:Reason #1 the Semantic Web will fail

[Wah]

For one thing, Google's results are much too noisy. For another, it relies on keywords occurring on pages, and that's rather primitive

No it doesn't. The genius of google was that it relies on people linking to pages talking about keywords. And uses various tools to identify and promote good linkers.

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.

That's a curious thing to ask for, since the first google result is a story about how there is a good bit of controversy surrounding Romario's "1,000" goals. The problem is your request is to vague and doesn't define all the words within itself (i.e. does a goal scored as teenager in a different league count?).

This goal is quite a bit higher than many realize, as you could get 10 people (5 of them experts) in a room and they wouldn't necessarily be able to agree on the "right" answer.

To ask, or even demand, that computers do the same task as a background function is ludicrious, IMHO (at least when applied to a universal context).

Why it will fail

[squoozer]

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?

One word: SPAM

[ngunton]

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.

Re:You keep using that word...

[radtea]

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

Lewis Carol had it right, and George Orwell agreed with him: "Which is to be master" is the question that matters.

In free societies, everyone is master, and our language is conditioned only by the minimal need to communicate approximately with others. Beyond that, we are free to impose whatever semantics we want, and we do this to a far greater extent than most people realize. As a friend who works in GIS once said, "If I send out a bunch of geologists to map a site and collate their data at the end of the day, I can tell you who mapped where, but not what anyone mapped." Individual meanings of terms as simple as "granite" or "schist" are sufficiently variable that even extremely concrete tasks are very difficult.

Imposing uniform ontologies on any but the most narrowly defined fields is impossible, and even within those fields nominally standard vocabularies will be used differently by rapidly-dividing "cultural" subgroups within the workers in the field.

The semantic web is doomed to fail because language is far more highly personalized than anyone wants to believe. I think this is a good thing, because the only way to impose standardized meanings on terms would be to impose standardized thinking on people, and if that were possible someone would have done it by now. Whereas we know, despite millennia of attempts, no such standardization is possible, except in very small groups over a very specialized range of concepts.

RDF promotes interoperability and extensibility

[Finin]

Stephen's argument is based on the belief that "The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating." He says:

"But the big problem is they believed everyone would work together:

• would agree on web standards (hah!)
• would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say)
• would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)"

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.

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.