Re: Where are the Linked Data Driven Smart Agents (Bots) ?

Hi,

This is a very important question for our community,
given that smart agents once were an important theme.
Actually, the main difference we could bring with the SemWeb
is that our clients could be decentralized
and actually run on the client side, in contrast to others.

One of the main problems I see is how our community
(now particularly thinking about the scientific subgroup)
receives submissions of novel work.
We have evolved into an extremely quantitative-oriented view,
where anything that can be measured with numbers
is largely favored over anything that cannot.

Given that the smart agents / bots field is quite new,
we don't know the right evaluation metrics yet.
As such, it is hard to publish a paper on this
at any of the main venues (ISWC / ESWC / …).
This discourages working on such themes.

Hence, I see much talent and time going to
incremental research, which is easy to evaluate well,
but not necessarily as ground-breaking.
More than a decade of SemWeb research
has mostly brought us intelligent servers,
but not yet the intelligent clients we wanted.

So perhaps we should phrase the question more broadly:
how can we as a community be more open
to novel and disruptive technologies?

Best,

Ruben

Received on Wednesday, 6 July 2016 16:39:07 UTC