Ask Slashdot: What Happened To Semantic Publishing?

An anonymous reader writes There has always been a demand for semantically enriched content, even long before the digital era. Take a look at the New York Times Index, which has been continuously published since 1913. Nowadays, technology can meet the high demands for "clever" content, and big publishers like the BBC and the NY Times are opening their data and also making a good use of it.

In this post, the author argues that Semantic Publishing is the future and talks about articles enriched with relevant facts and infoboxes with related content. Yet his example dates back to 2010, and today arguably every news website suggests related articles and provides links to external sources. This raises several questions: Why is there not much noise on this topic lately? Does this mean that we are already in the future of Online (Semantic) Publishing? Do we have all the tools now (e.g. Linked Data, fast NoSQL/Graph/RDF datastores, etc.) and what remains to be done is simply refinement and evolution? What is the difference in "cleverness" of content from different providers?

Comments

Hypertext is all you need -- /. included

[mi]

The publishers are (slowly) moving from simply copying plain-text, which they used to print (on dead trees), to web-sites, where hyper-linking is possible.

That's all you need — usually there is no reason to corral the links into a separate "info-box".

As the print-magazines wane and digital ones rise, this realization will come to the (still) technically-illiterate journalists and even their editors.

Meanwhile here on Slashdot (and other forums, where links are allowed), there is simply no excuse for making a claim without a clickable citation behind it... See the paragraph above for an example.